Until now it were the environmentalists and ecologists raising concerns about the ever-surging levels of what we all call Global Warming, but now a group of eminent scientists have warned of this imminent disaster waiting to devour us all. And to face the impending catastrophe nothing short of a planetary rescue would work.
Six prominent scientists from America’s leading scientific institutes have issued the unambiguous warning to not just one nation but to the entire world.
In what would be called an implicit criticism of the world climate body, they blamed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for misjudging the scale of sea-level rises during this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. Correcting the IPCC, the scientists fear that the true rise might be as great as several meters by 2100 and not just 40 centimeters as the IPCC predicted.
The clear cut message coming out of the scientific paper ‘Climate Change and trace gases’ published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, is planet Earth today is in imminent peril and man can no longer afford to ignore the gravest threat of climate change.
Forewarning they add that only intense efforts on the part of humanity to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within the range of the past one million years.
James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming, led the team. He was assisted by Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, all of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.
In their 29-page paper, the scientists dread that the unnatural forcing of the climate as a result of man-made carbon emissions threatens to produce a flip in the climate that could spark a catastrophe in the gigantic ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
The day-to-day developments in the field of science and a nuclear stage only pose an extra danger to the environment. They warn that the climate stability period or the Holocene is about to end, and with humanity would have to stop playing with the environment, else man has to bear a dramatic shift in climate, which would mean starting life from naught. Man simply cannot afford to burn the Earth’s remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. The entire civilization has only 10 years to rein in CO2 emissions to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Else, the extra heat could generate the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far more worse by the Albedo flip, a state in which sunlight reflected by white ice is abruptly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water.
Glaciers in both the northern and southern hemispheres are caving in under rising temperatures. The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland and the western Antarctic ice sheet, both show signs of the swift changes predicted with rising temperatures.
The study based on 400,000 years of climate records from deep ice cores, concludes that the dragon called global warming threatens the entire civilization and to rescue humanity from being devoured, a realistic strategy of extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is required.
Nations have to stop blaming each other for polluting the environment and start thinking on a possible strategy in this regard. Else, time is not far when the climate change warnings turn a reality.
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Via: The Independent