The reef had already started turning white when the little rat vanished. No one knows exactly how the rare rodent, known as the Bramble Cay melomys, first came to live on a tiny island at the tip of the Great Barrier Reef. But about a decade ago, the very last of them were wiped out, likely swept away by rising seas and storm surges in what is considered the world’s first mammal extinction caused by climate change.
Leading Australian scientists have considered what a 3-degree rise in global temperatures will look like for Australia in new detail, inBut they stress that the path out of such a future is still before us. While the 1.5-degree target will almost certainly be surpassed, if countries immediately set credible targets for 2030, we may still reach net zero by 2050, holding warming to about 2 degrees.
Cities and towns will need more tree cover, and some outdoor sport will probably move inside, while airconditioning systems will need to be optimised to avoid blackouts. Australia is home to some of the most unique ecosystems in the world but they are already radically changing, and extinctions accelerating – and that could have big impacts on the tourism and recreation industries that rely on our wild places. At 3 degrees, many Australian ecosystems would simply be “unrecognisable”, the report says.
Just as we adapt to fire and heatwaves, we will need to rethink how we live with floods. The hard surfaces used for driveways and footpaths may even be replaced with more permeable surfaces in the future. Three degrees might not seem a lot when we check our own daily weather forecast. But, as the report notes, 5 or 6 degrees is all that separates the Earth’s average surface temperature during the last ice age 20,000 years ago and its temperature today, and a whole lot was different back then. Half the planet was covered in ice, for one, and the sea was at least 100 metres below where it is now.
Take the Amazon rainforest, which helps shape the world’s weather. When people burn and log it for farming and timber, less moisture evaporates from the forest’s leaves to become rainfall, which drives drier conditions and more fires that eat the forest and so on – soon the jungle itself could reach a tipping point and turn into savannah. Or consider the massive Greenland ice sheet up north.
Large areas of the Amazon rainforest have burnt in recent years, often due to farming and land-clearing. Scientists fear too much fire in the “lungs of the planet” could trigger a tipping point of irreversible landscape change from jungle to savannah.Despite all that bad news, experts stress that the window to avoid 3 degrees has not closed yet, and the costs of getting there are actually far cheaper than once thought.
Source: Real Estate Daily Report (realestatedailyreport.net)
Greenland ice melting will alone add 7 metres to global sea levels, that is already fairly inevitable. Add Antartica and the rest and it’s 73m rise. Current predictions of 1m rise by 2100 are way low. Should stop building below that eventual shoreline!
We calculated this 40 years ago. We've done nothing about it for 4 decades. We have 2 decades left. Then it will be too late for most of the worlds major population centres.
Is Tim Flannery working at the SMH now.
Weep?
Never read more jibberish in my life. Is this seriously what the world he come to? Wow wee!!!!