EnviroLink Forum

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/0 ... 77835.html

Earth is rapidly headed toward a catastrophic breakdown if humans don't get their act together, according to an international group of scientists.

Writing Wednesday (June 6) in the journal Nature, the researchers warn that the world is headed toward a tipping point marked by extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale not seen since the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago.


"There is a very high possibility that by the end of the century, the Earth is going to be a very different place," study researcher Anthony Barnosky told LiveScience. Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, joined a group of 17 other scientists to warn that this new planet might not be a pleasant place to live.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Funny for an article that would seem to have apocalyptic dimensions they reduce the problem to a "transition." Hard to imagine someone who came to the article with little knowledge on the subject of climate change being galvanized by this piece.

The trick now is getting the chicago cubs to the world series before the worst...

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Is there any actual scientific paper burried under it to suggest that there is such a "tipping point" at all and what is needed to actually reach it?

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

we are like a car half-off a cliff. We keep stepping on the gas. Once over the edge, the breaks will not slow us down and things will move fast. So what are we actually worried about? Methane is one greenhouse gas many times more warming then CO2 and they call it "natural gas" for a reason: most things become methane when they rot. Peat bogs have been frozen since before the last ice age in the arctic regions. Thaw them out and you have a lot of new methane. Cold ocean water also holds a lot of gases (including CO2 and methane). Warm the oceans a bit and just like shaking your bottle of soda pop, the extra energy means the gases bubble out.

The tipping point of overpopulation to crash has passed. The tipping point of methane self release was in an article by 3 groups of tundra scientists posted here in 2009, and will be completely passed by 2020.
Soils at the time of die off will be at 90% gone, and aquifers, too.
The only thing that could stop all of it is the super volcanic eruption of Yellowstone. Ten years of volcanic winter.
Come on, blow baby blow!!!
This is from 5 months after the three tundra SCIENTIST GROUPS SAID ESCAPING METHANE WAS GOING UP GEOMETRICALLY AND at THE TIPPING POINT.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 06484.html

_________________
"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Some additional reading perhaps

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change

Several periods of abrupt climate change have been identified in the paleoclimatic record. Notable examples include:

About 25 climate shifts, called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, which have been identified in the ice core record during the glacial period over the past 100,000 years.[citation needed] The most recent of these events was the Younger Dryas which began 12,900 years ago and moved back into a warm-and-wet climate regime about 11,600 years ago.[citation needed]
The Younger Dryas event, notably its sudden end. It has been suggested that: "The extreme rapidity of these changes in a variable that directly represents regional climate implies that the events at the end of the last glaciation may have been responses to some kind of threshold or trigger in the North Atlantic climate system."[20] A model for this event based on disruption to the thermohaline circulation has been supported by other studies.[16]
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, timed at 55 million years ago, which may have been caused by the clathrate gun effect,[21] although potential alternative mechanisms have been identified.[22] This was associated with rapid ocean acidification[23]
The Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, also known as the great dying, in which up to 95% of all species became extinct, has been hypothesized to be related to a rapid change in global climate.[24][25] Life on land took 30M years to recover.[26]
The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse occurred 300 million years ago, at which time tropical rainforests were devastated by climate change. The cooler, drier climate had a severe effect on the biodiversity of amphibians, the primary form of vertebrate life on land.[2]
There are also abrupt climate changes associated with the catastrophic draining of glacial lakes. One example of this is the 8.2 kiloyear event, which associated with the draining of Glacial Lake Agassiz.[27] Another example is the Antarctic Cold Reversal, c. 14,500 years before present (BP), which is believed to have been caused by a meltwater pulse from the Antarctic ice sheet.[citation needed] These rapid meltwater release events have been hypothesized as a cause for Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles,[28]

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein