Suddenly

Back in the old days, 40 years ago or so, scientists and journalists were cautious in talking about climate change. Didn’t want to be seen as cranks and alarmists doncha know. Those days are over.

More and more scientists are now admitting publicly that they are scared by the recent climate extremes, such as the floods in Pakistan and west Africa, the droughts and heatwaves in Europe and east Africa, and the rampant ice melt at the poles.

That is not because an increase in extremes was not predicted. It was always high on the list of concerns alongside longer-term issues such as sea level rise. It is the suddenness and ferocity of recent events that is alarming researchers, combined with the ill-defined threat of tipping points, by which aspects of heating would become unstoppable.

For real. It’s not that long ago that the orthodox take was don’t expect big dramatic changes right now, then suddenly the big dramatic changes were all up in our faces.

Climate computer models have typically projected a fairly consistent but smooth rise in temperatures. But recently the climate seems to have gone haywire.

That heat wave in the west last summer wasn’t smooth. The floods in Pakistan aren’t smooth. The drought that dried up Europe’s rivers this past summer wasn’t smooth. The wildfires in Australia and California weren’t smooth. The disappearance of the Colorado river isn’t smooth. The melting of the permafrost, the rapidly shrinking glaciers, the disappearance of the North Pole as a solid object…none of that is smooth.

But it is the threat of unstoppable long-term change that most worries Prof Dame Jane Francis, director of the British Antarctic Survey. She has witnessed temperatures in the Antarctic of 40C above the seasonal norm, and 30C above in the Arctic.

Francis was most alarmed by a recent report warning that if the 1.5C threshold were exceeded, seen by most scientists as almost inevitable, it could trigger multiple climate tipping points – abrupt, irreversible and with dangerous impacts.

She said: “It’s really scary. It seems some of [these trends] are already under way.” She said she feared for the permafrost, the Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic sea ice, and Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier and western ice sheet.

The Arctic sea ice used to be a large solid thing that was a kind of continent. Now it isn’t.

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