The important variables are harvesting rate and the intrinsic rate of increase. We are hearty, but we are entering the unknown.Įstimating or calculating time to extinction is fairly routine in conservation biology. This might seem strange to you, but the evolutionary history of tooth shape (largely the accumulation of structures for resisting tooth wear) teaches that mammals and our early ancestors experienced much harsher conditions of life than most of us have yet imagined.

The Earth is unforgiving, and few except castaways, mountaineers and volcanologists have ever felt its storm and fury and indifference. +NASA Earth Observatory’s Global Temperatures World of Changeįaster than you think. +NASA’s Global Climate Change Evidence Page Also, below are a few other good resources if you’re looking to understand some of the basics about climate change. Each chapter of the report has a supplementary information section with dozens of references that detail the evidence the scientists used to draw their conclusions.įor more details, the IPCC also put together a succinct summary for policy makers, a press release, headline statements, and FAQs. If you are wondering what the IPCC authors based their findings on, there is no shortage of information to explore. The second-best time to plant a tree is today,” The New York Times quoted the marathon world record holder as saying. “The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. In this case, he noted that what he said on television was a riff on something that renowned Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge once said. Like any good scientist, Schmidt is always quick to give credit where credit is due. “But the second best time to reduce emissions is right now.” “The key thing to remember is that it’s clear that the best time to have reduced emissions was 25 years ago,” he said during an interview with PBS News Hour. In just one sentence, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, captured the essence of the report. And without dramatic reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the problems are going to get far worse. Many parts of the world are already seeing rising sea levels, hotter temperatures, more extreme precipitation and droughts, more acidic oceans, and faster rates of extinctions, the scientists said. In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released yet another sobering report about the planetary disruption happening because of all the carbon human activity puts into the atmosphere. 'The key thing to remember from this report is that it's clear that the best time to have reduced emissions was 25 years ago,' of tells 'But the second best to reduce emissions is right now.' /ndMIzRSS0t

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