It will melt. Global Warming: How Science Works

Changes in the Earth's climate observed by scientists are becoming more and more alarming every day. This is extremely current problem, which cannot be ignored. Humanity may face many disasters - earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, etc.

Over the past 50 years temperature rise rate earth's surface doubled the figures hundred years ago(over the last hundred years average temperature increased by 0.74°C). Also, in mind increasing concentration greenhouse gas , the average temperature of the earth's surface is expected to increase by 3°C.

All current global warming phenomena bring with them powerful heat waves, increased drought in some regions and more intense precipitation in others, new wind patterns, melting glaciers and, as a consequence, sea ​​level rise.

Let's find out what climate expert James Hansen predicts for 2016.

Hansen was born on March 29, 1941 in the city of Denison (USA, Iowa). James Hansen is American professor Department of Ecology and Geosciences at Columbia University, and a NASA employee. The 74-year-old scientist is known for his extensive climate research. Twenty-seven years ago, while speaking to Congress, Hansen explained in detail the consequences of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global warming in general.

It was incredible brave act, as Senator Tim Virta, who then chaired Congress, recalls: “In 1988, James first announced the impact of human activity on the rise in temperature of the planetary atmosphere. This took a lot of courage. After all, then he was the only one who decided to publicly talk about it. Since then, his voice has never ceased.”

Prediction by J. Hansen

In 1981, James Hansen and a group of scientists, after conducting long studies of the Earth's climate, wrote an article in which he spoke in detail about the warming of the planet, which is associated with the accumulation of concentrations carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Hansen emphasizes that humanity has long crossed the critical line of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere: “We have reached the point where the emergency has become planetary scale. We are very close to turning point throughout the global climate system. If we miss it, then huge systemic changes will begin, and the process will get out of control.”

According to his prediction for 2016, it may happen that arctic ice will melt completely in just one summer season. Of course, this can be prevented if we just stop burning fossil fuels and stop using coal, which is the main source of greenhouse gases.

“We have already reached one point of no return, and over the summer season we may lose the entire Arctic ice cover. This will happen due to a disruption in the planet’s energy balance,” says Hansen.

The professor attracts the public and politicians to the problem of climate on our planet. He often gives interviews, appears on television, and writes in writing to world leaders, including US President Barack Obama.

Hansen publishes books that tell dire consequences thoughtless activities of mankind if people do not come to their senses and take measures to reduce fuel use. If no steps are taken in this direction, natural disasters will be destructive on an unprecedented scale, entire species of animals and plants will disappear, and the melting of glaciers will entail an unprecedented rise in sea level. In other words, Hansen is predicting the end of the world for the whole world.

Global warming 2016 could be the beginning of the end and this is no joke. The warming of our planet has become irreversible, scientists say. These are the findings of a global study conducted by 413 climate scientists from 58 countries. This is reported in the annual bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Even if humanity sharply reduces carbon dioxide emissions, the world's oceans will continue to warm over the next hundreds, if not thousands, of years, scientists say. An increase in the temperature of the planet’s water cover entails an increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere, the melting of glaciers, and increased heating upper layers sushi.

Thomas Karl, newsletter coordinator National Administration Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (NOAA), notes that all indicators indicate a change in the climate of our planet in all its corners, from the ocean depths to the upper atmosphere. The data released by NOAA is truly frightening: last year, the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere was 397.2 parts per million (ppm), compared to 354 parts 25 years ago. And this is not surprising, because since 1990, industrial emissions into the atmosphere have increased 4 times.

In 2014, a record temperature was set over the land surface, dating back to 1880. Last year it was 0.88 degrees higher than in late XIX century, and 0.37-0.44 degrees more than at the end of the 20th century beginning of XXI centuries

The level of the World Ocean has increased by 6.2 centimeters compared to the end of the last century. This is not catastrophic, but scientists are much more concerned about changes in the main currents: for example, the Gulf Stream, which has always served as a kind of stove for Europe, is weakening literally before our eyes. At the same time, the number of hurricanes occurring over oceanic massifs has increased by 10 percent compared to the 90s of the last century.

Carbon dioxide emissions will hit a record in 2016

Carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of global warming, have been increasing again since 2015, reaching a record high of 4 billion tons. Released data from the Global Carbon Project shows a possible increase of 2.6%. The information was released ahead of the climate summit in New York, where world leaders discussed future action on climate change.

The latest annual report from the Global Carbon Budget, a project that examines, in particular, the carbon dioxide cycle in the atmosphere, indicates that future CO2 emissions cannot exceed 1.2 trillion tons. Under this condition, there is still a chance that the annual increase in average temperature will be less than two degrees Celsius. By at the current pace The emissions quota of 1.2 trillion will be exceeded over the next 30 years. In other words, it will happen in one generation. If urgent measures are not taken, then soon there will be no one to achieve coziness and comfort in a small apartment.

Global warming 2016 cannot be stopped - scientists

Environmentalists note that to avoid significant climate change on the planet, more than half of all combustible mineral resources must remain undiscovered. Until then, new technologies for storing carbon in the ground will be developed and implemented.

Professor Corinne Le Coeur, Director of the Tindel Climate Research Center (UK), notes:

Human influence on climate change is obvious. If we want to slow them down, then we need a steady reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion. We are now too far from meeting the conditions necessary to keep summer temperature rises to within two degrees. For many countries in the world, even the richest, reaching this level is already difficult. Policymakers at the New York summit should think very carefully about limiting their choices, as climate science has shown.

The annual Global Carbon Budget contains a forecast general indicators 2015, and also provides last year’s data by country and per capita.

A new study by French scientists has shown that summer in Europe now begins 10 days earlier than 40 years ago. And if current rates of carbon dioxide emissions continue, then by the end of the century hot time will begin already 20 days ahead of schedule, characteristic of the pre-industrial era.

Tomertu | Shutterstock.com

The Earth's seasonal clock is out of whack, and climate change is affecting everything from primroses to migratory birds. And this is noticeable not only in Europe. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, trees are beginning to bud prematurely and butterflies and birds are arriving.

The annual transition from winter to summer in the early 1960s occurred around April 10; in 2010, it was recorded on March 30. And by 2100, according to scientists, summer in Europe will begin on March 25. The effects of seasonal shifts are seen in the earlier bud break of grapes in France, the cherry blossoms in Switzerland, the summer flowers in England, and other changes in seasonal patterns.

Aiaikawa | Shutterstock.com

“The acceleration of summer has paralleled the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the past 50 years. Atmospheric warming plays a significant role in the early onset of summer. This can be seen from the time the snow melts in winter in Eastern Europe and a reduction in the circulation of cold air across the continent,” explained climatologist and study co-author Julien Cathu from the French National Center for Meteorological Research.

At the same time, Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, finds some flaws in the new study, including its simplified analysis of two seasons and the use of models that do not fully capture all of the complex weather processes. However, he notes that separate meteorological studies conducted elsewhere have also found changes in weather seasons.

Amit Erez | Shutterstock.com

According to a recent study published in " International magazine climatology", in the USA spring and summer (not calendar, but determined threshold values temperatures and circulation patterns) each decade has occurred earlier than the previous one by about 1.5 days since 1948. Autumn and winter, respectively, are later.

“The extent of change depends on location. The most significant indicators are observed along Atlantic bays and the California coast. There, the onset of summer has shifted by more than three days over a decade,” said study lead author Michael Allen, a climate scientist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

In China more than early research Daily temperature data showed that summer there advanced by almost 6 days between 1951 and 2000, while the winter season shortened by 11 days.

The extra days of wearing light dresses and T-shirts might sound like good news to people who don't enjoy shoveling snow or walking through spring slush. But even minor changes in seasonal chronology can cause a ricochet of many effects in nature. If we're talking about about food production, any shift in the seasons will of course affect flowering cycles associated with pollinating insects and other interdependent natural processes regulated by the seasons.

Michael Allen

Birds are one of the harbingers of seasonal changes weather conditions. Last week, scientists reported that global warming over the past three decades has significantly affected the birds of Europe and North America. The biggest impacts of climate change have been on populations of wrens, robins and many other common species. A study on this problem was published in Science.

The number of species that find themselves in a favorable habitat, in harmony with changing conditions, increases. These include the Cassina royal tyrant, which lives in the southwestern United States. These birds' range is expanding as the weather gets warmer in Colorado and Wyoming. Species whose natural environment are shrinking and falling into disrepair. This is, for example, a Canadian warbler losing its rain forests, and the white-throated sparrow, which climate change is depriving northern territories. At the same time, the number of American robin is decreasing in southern regions, such as Louisiana, but is increasing in the Dakotas.

The researchers compared annual reports containing the abundance of more than 500 species on two continents between 1980 and 2010 with climate data for the same period, highlighting those whose habitats had been damaged by global warming and those whose living conditions had become worse. more favorable. It also had widespread consequences for bees, butterflies and countless other creatures across the globe, according to scientists.

Estonian scientist Peter Noges reports on how the disrupted seasonal cycle is affecting his country's lakes. According to him, throughout last decade Abnormally early warmth prevents lake “turnover,” an annual process that mixes water and transports oxygen to depth. This had a negative impact on the livelihoods of large fish, which is a bad sign for a region where fishing important for economics and recreation.

“People need to understand the cost of such a “spring summer”. In fact, abnormal weather leads to irreparable natural losses,” warns Noges, a limnologist at the Estonian University of Life Sciences.

• Translation

Science is facts. Houses are made of stone, but science is made of facts. But a pile of rocks is not a house, and a pile of facts is not necessarily science.
- Jules Henri Poincaré

This seems pretty obvious. This is intuitive, based on your experience. If you drop an egg with enough high altitude, it will break.

And if jumping from a springboard is not so scary, jumping from a higher height may already begin to worry you.

Even if you've never done it, you assume that if you jump from a high enough height, you might fall to your death at the end of the jump. So how can you know if it is safe or not? Are you too high to jump?

Believe it or not, this is what science is all about, and this is how we become scientists.

We are told one big myth about scientific method as if there was one unchanging way to do science. If you remove all the pretentiousness, it turns out that science is a way to understand the world around us.

If this happens, then what happens next? You don't sit back and pontificate about your thoughts on the matter - you go out and do your research. You make observations, make measurements of all those things that happen in different conditions.

You may learn that there are heights from which you cannot jump safely, and you may even be able to quantify them. And when you're satisfied with your findings, you can put all that knowledge together and say something smart and informed like:

The higher you fall from, the faster you will move when you hit the ground.

And this statement brings all your investigations, observations, measurements and experiences together, and describes not only the experience you have gained, but also extrapolates it to more general case, allowing you to make predictions about what will happen in cases that you have not yet tried to experience.

Having reached this point, you will find yourself at the start of what can be called scientific theory. You can start making predictions if you configure the system in a certain way. If what your theory predicted happens, it confirms it. But every theory has limitations, a point where it stops working.

In our example, the theory stops working when the object reaches a steady speed, when the force of air resistance is compared with the force of gravity, accelerating the fall. At this moment, the height from which you fell is no longer important - you will not fall faster.

But science, of course, can do more. Instead of the qualitative statement above, we can determine, based on precise definition all interacting forces (including gravity, air resistance, wind speed, etc.), how fast and in what direction the falling object will move at any given time. Quantitatively.

And testing this theory each time in new conditions and under new circumstances, we either receive confirmation that our best theory copes with new conditions, or we discover that the theory does not describe everything.

AND most of In human history, science has moved incredibly slowly.

Magnetism was first discovered in the 13th century (it was discovered by Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt), but only in the 19th century was its connection with electricity and electric charge, and the successful description of quantum mechanics, which causes magnetism, was made relatively recently.

Subsequent discoveries were not canceled early theories, they just opened restrictions early ideas and went beyond them.

And before understanding genetics - the mechanisms of inheritance - we could determine that the properties of living beings change over time, including the main mechanism of this change.

Of course, today science knows too much for one person to become an expert on all issues of all sciences. That's why we have scientific experts who know important details their areas. Alternative theory evolution must not only explain everything that the theory of evolution explains, but also include genetics, DNA and everything else that was built on evolution.

The same applies to the Universe.

At some point in the past, the Big Bang theory was not even the leading theory about the early stages of the development of the Universe. But there were observations - cosmic microwave background radiation, the evolution of galaxies, the initial abundance of elements - and the alternatives fell away, unable to continue. Today the Big Bang model predicts various phenomena– gravitational lensing, large-scale space structures, fluctuations in microwave background radiation, etc. – and they all fit observations perfectly, unlike any of the alternatives.

Achieving scientific consensus on any issue is very difficult because the evidence must be very convincing. If there are several reasonable explanations that fit the data obtained with at least some error, consensus cannot be achieved.

We are skeptics. We don't believe explanations that just sound plausible. We are watching. We are counting. We predict. We test and change our theories. We test their boundaries and move on. We demand repetition of experiments and quantitative accuracy of the theory's predictions.

But if all the alternatives turn out to be much worse - as in the case of evolution and the Big Bang - you will find that more than 95% of experts in the field will agree. And when these facts pose a threat to public health and safety, this is very important.

You won't die if you don't believe in Big bang. You will simply be wrong, and you will not have a deep and thorough understanding of your origins and existence. You are free to choose, of course. But if you decide to taste mercury or lead, smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, breathe heavily polluted air, or swallow small amounts of polonium, the consequences will be much more serious. The same is true for the Earth.

This consensus has four simple components:

1. The earth is heating up and this heating is accelerating.
2. Heating is mainly caused by human activity characterized by the emission of greenhouse gases.
3. If the release of gases continues, the temperature will continue to rise. As a result, ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise, and the climate of many regions will change dramatically.
4. All these possibilities - and the accompanying ones natural disasters- must be avoided, because they are harmful and dangerous.

On the first three points the consensus is very strong (corresponding to the 95% I mentioned), and although I have not heard anyone of any significance object to the fourth point, it is possible that there are such opinions.

The second and third points are very difficult to argue against scientifically, since humans have already emitted over a trillion tons of greenhouse gases, which has increased temperatures in the same way that wrapping yourself in blankets will increase your temperature. The physics is so clear and simple that - with the exception of the problem of quantitatively modeling the limits of temperature increase - there is no room for discussion.

Therefore, climate change skeptics focus on the first point: they try to deny the Earth's rising temperature and its acceleration. Richard Mueller, a noted skeptic, has called for measuring and scrutinizing previous measurements of global average temperatures, and testing how confident we should be in claims from NOAA, NASA GISS and other sources that the Earth's temperature is rising. What is the result?

The United Temperature Database contains 1.6 billion records, available at www.BerkeleyEarth.org. There you can read the works and check them. As can be seen, they confirm the results of previous work with great accuracy, showing that over the past 60 years the temperature has increased by an average of 1 degree Celsius, and that over the past 30 years the rate of increase has been accelerating.

Over the past hundred years, the average temperature of the atmosphere at the Earth's surface has increased by about 0.7 degrees Celsius. By the end of this century, the situation, according to most forecasts, will only worsen - average temperatures will increase by one to three degrees. The main reason global change Climate change is considered to be an increase in the concentration of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere due to human activity - the combustion of most energy resources is accompanied by the release of carbon dioxide. Lenta.ru tells how warming will affect the Russian Arctic.

The glaciers of Antarctica, the Arctic, and Greenland are already melting. In 2011-2014 alone, Greenland produced about a trillion tons of ice. This corresponds to a sea level rise of 0.75 millimeters per year. The most intense ice melting occurred in 2012, when summer temperatures reached record levels. high values.

In Antarctica the situation is even worse. The melting of one of the world's largest glaciers, Totten, will expose tens of kilometers of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and raise sea levels by 2.9 meters. Melting rate reached critical values already in the next century, when the disappearance of the ice cover after the meltwater circulating at its base spreads under the glacier 100-150 kilometers deep into the continent will become irreversible.

Global warming will directly affect Russia, more than 60 percent of which is in the zone permafrost. IN Western Siberia the depth of the layer without periodic thawing is on average about 20 meters, further towards the Northern Arctic Ocean- even deeper, hundreds of meters. Record depth permafrost layer was recorded in the upper reaches of the Vilyui River in Yakutia - 1370 meters. And what will happen to all this in the next hundred years?

“According to forecasts, the area occupied by permafrost in Russia may decrease by 20-25 percent by the middle of the 21st century, and by end of XXI century - by 31-56 percent,” reported at the conference “Problems of Forecasting emergency situations» Konstantin Moskin, acting head of the All-Russian Center for Monitoring and Forecasting of Emergency Situations “Antistikhia”.

Photo: press service of the governor of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug

The soil will thaw, sag and fill with water. Over time, it is likely that the decisive role in these processes will shift from an increase in average annual temperatures to an increase in precipitation. In the worst case scenario huge territories The current permafrost will turn into deep swamps. The degradation of these territories is already observed.

Objects of the oil and gas complex are under threat, industrial enterprises, as well as cities that may go underground. “Currently, due to permafrost degradation, up to 60 percent of objects in Igarka, Dikson, Khatanga are deformed, up to 100 percent in the villages of the Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, 22 percent in Tiksi, 55 percent in Dudinka, 50 percent in Pevek and Amderma , about 40 percent are in Vorkuta,” Moskin noted.

The permafrost in most of these territories has not thawed for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. In addition to the physical subsidence of land, global warming will lead to the deconservation of the artifacts contained in them. Because of this, for example, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug an outbreak was reported in July 2016 anthrax, which has not been observed there since 1941. Fossil remains of animals that lived in ancient times in Siberia will also undergo degradation.

The landscapes of Siberia will change dramatically. The well-known Yamal sinkholes are one example negative forms relief caused by global warming. More such depressions with a diameter and depth of several tens of meters have already formed. These are the so-called gas release funnels, which arise due to the destruction of gas hydrates - the release of gas contained in the upper layers of permafrost.

By the end of the 21st century, the average annual increase in temperatures in northern regions the country could reach five degrees Celsius. This is quite expected, since the increase in temperatures in Russia, starting from the 1970s, exceeds the world average by 2.5 times. However, there are benefits to global warming. First of all, a shift in the border suitable for agriculture lands to the north and increased navigation on the Northern Sea Route.

To slow the rate of global warming, developed and developing countries adopted the Kyoto Protocol. Russia ratified it in 2005. The document provides for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Russia, which accounts for about 17.4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, has exceeded its commitments under the protocol, reducing emissions by 37 percent over the past 20 years.