{"id":9680,"date":"2015-07-03T09:03:18","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T14:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9680"},"modified":"2015-07-03T09:03:18","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T14:03:18","slug":"will-climate-chaos-reign-in-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9680","title":{"rendered":"Will climate chaos reign in the Anthropocene?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will climate chaos reign in the Anthropocene?<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"storm<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFar from being self-stabilizing, the Earth\u2019s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cHuman civilization developed during the Holocene (the past 12,000 years). It has been warm enough to keep ice sheets off North America and Europe, but cool enough for ice sheets to remain on Greenland and Antarctica. With rapid warming of 0.6\u00b0C in the past 30 years, global temperature is at its warmest level in the Holocene. \u2026 Earth\u2019s paleoclimatic record tells us that atmospheric greenhouse gases are now near the dangerous level where tipping points become unavoidable.\u201d \u2013James Hansen [1]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

To judge by many accounts of climate change, the twenty-first century will gradually become a warmer, stormier, and less biodiverse version of the twentieth. There\u2019s an unspoken assumption that the Anthropocene will be less pleasant than the Holocene, but not fundamentally different, and that the transition will be smooth. As research commissioned by the U.S. National Research Council points out, that assumption leads to particular conclusions about society\u2019s ability to respond to change:<\/p>\n

\u201cMany projections of future climatic conditions have predicted steadily changing conditions giving the impression that communities have time to gradually adapt, for example, by adopting new agricultural practices to maintain productivity in hotter and drier conditions, or by organizing the relocation of coastal communities as sea level rises.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the authors emphasize that the actual experience could be very different:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scientific community has been paying increasing attention to the possibility that at least some changes will be abrupt, perhaps crossing a threshold or \u2018tipping point\u2019 to change so quickly that there will be little time to react. This concern is reasonable because such abrupt changes \u2013 which can occur over periods as short as decades, or even years \u2013 have been a natural part of the climate system throughout Earth\u2019s history. The paleoclimate record \u2013 information on past climate gathered from sources such as fossils, sediment cores, and ice cores \u2013 contains ample evidence of abrupt changes in Earth\u2019s ancient past, including sudden changes in ocean and air circulation, or abrupt extreme extinction events.\u201d\u00a0[2]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Will climate chaos reign in the Anthropocene? \u201cFar from being self-stabilizing, the Earth\u2019s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.\u201d   \u201cHuman civilization developed during the Holocene (the past 12,000 years). It has been warm enough to keep ice sheets off North America and Europe, but cool enough for ice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[1208,138,140,141,1230,6956,6955],"class_list":["post-9680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-anthropocene","tag-civilisation","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-chaos","tag-human-civilisation","tag-james-hansen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9681,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9680\/revisions\/9681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}