Our planet teeters on the brink of several tipping points that, if they occur, will trigger a series of environmental changes.
Heat waves, droughts, floods and storms are becoming more common and intense, and energy trapped by Earth’s atmosphere makes the oceans like a soda under pressure.
Now a new study published in the journal Science Alert by a team of researchers led by University of Virginia climate scientist Paul Dermaer, simulating the Earth’s future to the year 2100, shows how fundamentally increasing changes in temperature and precipitation could alter the climate at the local level, so much so that we would have to to redrawing maps first conceived in the 1880s, reports Al-Rai daily.
Depending on the climate models the researchers used to generate projections of future global change, those estimates could be pushed even further, as nearly 50 percent of the Earth’s land area could be pushed into an unfamiliar climate zone.
The shifts are becoming more apparent with the latest generation of climate models, which are more sensitive to changes in climate and predict more severe rates of global warming.
To chart the expected changes, Diermeyer turned to Köppen-Geiger maps, a system used to classify the world into five climate zones based on temperature, precipitation and seasons.
The Köppen-Geiger climate classification maps were developed by German-Russian climatologist Vladimir Köppen in 1884, have been updated several times since then, and are widely used to model species distribution and growth.
The shifts in climate regions predicted by Diermeyer and colleagues are only a spectrum of possibilities, because the physics of some climate variables such as precipitation are more difficult to simulate than others, such as temperature.
However, if we don’t act soon to cut emissions, global warming will continue to accelerate within decades, suggesting that vulnerable species and agriculture may have less time to adapt to changes in climate.
Based on their analysis, they expect tropical climates to expand, from 23 percent to 25 percent of the land mass, by 2100.
Similarly, more land surface areas are expected to enter drought zones, by approximately 34 percent, compared to 31 percent now.
By far the most dramatic change will be in the polar region, which covered nearly 8 percent of our planet’s land area between 1901 and 1930 and has already shrunk to 6.5 percent with just under 1.2 degrees Celsius of the world experiencing warming. Earth so far, and this is among the study’s most paradoxical findings showing just how much our planet has already changed.
“Once again, it just goes to show that whatever observational method we apply, our planet is showing rapid change, but it’s never too late to save it,” Dermayer wrote.