LC13C. Stay Current—What Does Earth’s Past Tell Us About Our Future?

2023-03-16. Tonga Eruption May Temporarily Push Earth Closer to 1.5°C of Warming. [https://eos.org/articles/tonga-eruption-may-temporarily-push-earth-closer-to-1-5c-of-warming] By J. Besl, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The underwater eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai sent megatons of water vapor into the stratosphere, contributing to an increase in global warming over the next 5 years. When Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai (HTHH) erupted in January 2022, it shot the standard volcanic cocktail of ash, gas, and pulverized rock into the sky. But the eruption included one extra ingredient that’s now causing climate concerns: a significant splash of ocean water. The underwater caldera shot 146 metric megatons of water into the stratosphere like a geyser, potentially contributing to atmospheric warming over the next 5 years, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change….

2014-07-08. Blueprint for Taming the Climate Crisis. Excerpt: Here’s what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change. Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply. It offers a sobering conclusion. We might be able to pull it off. But it will take an overhaul of the way we use energy, and a huge investment in the development and deployment of new energy technologies. Significantly, it calls for an entirely different approach to international diplomacy on the issue of how to combat climate change. “This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” …The teams, one in each of the 15 countries, looked at what would be necessary to keep the atmosphere from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the preindustrial average of the late 19th century, a target that most of the world committed to at the climate summit meeting in Copenhagen five years ago. To do so, CO₂ emissions from industry and energy use would have to fall to at most 1.6 tons a year for every person on the planet by midcentury… The decarbonization paths rely on aggressive assumptions about our ability to deploy new technologies on a commercial scale economically. For instance, carbon capture and storage is supposed to be available starting in about 10 years. Second-generation biofuels are assumed to come into play by 2020. Hydrogen fuel cells and power storage technology are deployed starting around 2030. …Big challenges remain. Any 40-year forecast must be taken with some skepticism. Technologies that seem feasible and economic today might turn out not to be. And it bears repeating that though the teams contend they can get to 1.6 tons per person, they have not yet. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/blueprints-for-taming-the-climate-crisis.html?ref=science&_r=0. By Eduardo Porter, New York Times. 

2011 March 2. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News Center. Excerpt: …In a study to be published in the March 3 issue of the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, paleobiologists assess where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction, compared with the past 540 million years, and they find cause for hope as well as alarm….
…“So far, only 1 to 2 percent of all species have gone extinct in the groups we can look at clearly, so by those numbers, it looks like we are not far down the road to extinction. We still have a lot of Earth’s biota to save,” [Professor Anthony] Barnosky said. “It’s very important to devote resources and legislation toward species conservation if we don’t want to be the species whose activity caused a mass extinction.”….
…The study originated in a graduate seminar Barnosky organized in 2009 to bring biologists and paleontologists together in an attempt to compare the extinction rate seen in the fossil record with today’s extinction record….
[See also Multitude of Species Face Climate Threat, by Carl Zimmer, The NY Times.]

2009 June 19. Sudden Collapse In Ancient Biodiversity: Was Global Warming The Culprit?ScienceDaily. Excerpt: Scientists have unearthed striking evidence for a sudden ancient collapse in plant biodiversity. A trove of 200 million-year-old fossil leaves collected in East Greenland tells the story, carrying its message across time to us today.
…The researchers were surprised to find that a likely candidate responsible for the loss of plant life was a small rise in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which caused Earth’s temperature to rise.
Global warming has long been considered as the culprit for extinctions–the surprise is that much less carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere may be needed to drive an ecosystem beyond its tipping point than previously thought.
…Until this research, the pace of the extinctions was thought to have been gradual, taking place over millions of years.
It has been notoriously difficult to tease out details about the pace of extinction using fossils, scientists say, because fossils can provide only snap-shots or glimpses of organisms that once lived.
Using a technique developed by scientist Peter Wagner of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the researchers were able to detect, for the first time, very early signs that these ancient ecosystems were already deteriorating–before plants started going extinct.
The method reveals early warning signs that an ecosystem is in trouble in terms of extinction risk.
…By the year 2100, it’s expected that the level of carbon dioxide in the modern atmosphere may reach as high as two and a half times today’s level.
“This is of course a ‘worst case scenario,'” says Jennifer McElwain of University College Dublin, the paper’s lead author. “But it’s at exactly this level [900 parts per million] at which we detected the ancient biodiversity crash.
“We must take heed of the early warning signs of deterioration in modern ecosystems. We’ve learned from the past that high levels of species extinctions–as high as 80 percent–can occur very suddenly, but they are preceded by long interval of ecological change.”…

2006 February. Affecting Evolution and Extinction. By David Pescovitz. ScienceMatters@Berkeley, Volume 3, Issue 18. Every so often, a huge number of species on Earth are wiped out relatively quickly. The last time a large extinction event occurred, between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, two-thirds of large mammals were swept into the dustbin of history. Why? UC Berkeley paleontologist Anthony Barnosky sifts through the fossil record to understand how environmental changes can cause mammals to move, evolve, and sometimes die off. His research could even help reveal whether we’re headed for another mass extinction. …The aim… is to differentiate between effects of climate change that are natural, and those that could be harbingers of a bigger problem…. “Is part of being a species the fact that you move around in response to climate change and it’s no big deal?” Barnosky says. “I’m trying to establish a natural baseline of how much communities change in response to climate change in the past.” … Barnosky … investigate[d] the cause of large mammal extinctions in the late Pleistocene period, 50,000 to 10,000 years ago. Historically, scientists have thought that human populations of the time over-hunted, killing off animals such as mammoths, ground sloths, native American horses, and camels. However, Barnosky and his colleagues discovered that human impact wasn’t the sole cause of the extinctions. Rather, climate change combined with the over-hunting was a “one-two punch” leading to the extinction, he says. The big concern, Barnosky says, is that the state of the planet then is not so different from today. “We’ve ramped everything up,” he says. “Global warming has never been faster and human populations are exploding exponentially. Realistically, I think the ecosystem will change pretty dramatically.

13 July 2004. Will Compasses Point South? By WILLIAM J. BROAD. The Earth’s magnetic field is collapsing and may eventually reappear with opposite polarity. But what effect will that have on us? 

2003. Alibrandi, Marsha, GIS in the Classroom and CD-Rom. Heinemann Educational Books, Inc. Portsmouth, NH. 2003. ISBN 032500479X. Grade level: 9-12. Reviewed here(10/15/2003) by Eloise Farmer [GSS teacher leader and] Biology Teacher retiring in June after 37.5 years. The book would be useful with Life and Climate, since many suggested activities involve students monitoring the effects of human activities on a variety of things on local bodies of water, or ecosystems in general. It also could be used with Ecosystem Change, or Changing Climate for the same reason. Students could use GIS to map changes in coastlines due to erosion, the effects of storms on an area, etc. It really emphasizes systems, so it could be used with any of the GSS books. This link tells how it has been used in a high school.