{"id":419,"date":"2009-01-15T14:55:15","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T22:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/?p=419"},"modified":"2010-03-19T09:51:34","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T17:51:34","slug":"making-way-for-fast-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/2009\/01\/15\/making-way-for-fast-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Way for Fast Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Climate Report: Look for more drought and melting glaciers, says OSU\u2019s Peter Clark.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n \"Peter\n
Peter Clark<\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n

To a geoscientist, the movie \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d is an outlandish imagining of abrupt climate change, even down to heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal\u2019s geeky heroics in the lead role.<\/p>\n

But abrupt climate change is not only plausible; it\u2019s likely to occur in this century \u2014 even faster in some ways than previous reports have indicated. That\u2019s the conclusion of a recent report by OSU geosciences<\/a> professor Peter Clark<\/a> and colleagues for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/div>\n

The report \u2014 one of 21 of its kind developed by academic and government agency researchers around the country \u2014 specifically identifies faster-than-expected loss of sea ice, rising sea levels and a possibly permanent state of drought in the American Southwest as likelihoods in the near future. It is one of the first reports that describes possible impacts on the North American continent in such detail.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the earth warms you can push it to a point where change happens more quickly than expected,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re forcing changes with global warming at a rate the Earth\u2019s climate system has experienced only a few times in history,\u201d says Clark. Generally climate change is understood to have occurred, but is believed to have taken place slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years. But the Earth\u2019s climate \u2014 at times \u2014 has also changed surprisingly quickly, on the order of decades.<\/p>\n

The report evaluated four mechanisms for abrupt climate change that have taken place prehistorically, including rapid changes in glaciers, ice sheets and sea level; widespread changes to the hydrologic cycle; abrupt changes in ocean current patterns; and rapid release to the atmosphere of methane trapped in permafrost or on continental margins.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of these have the potential to change quickly due to global warming,\u201d Clark says. The report concluded that we should not expect catastrophic changes in ocean current patterns or abrupt release of methane into the atmosphere, but that rapid change in the other mechanisms may already be in place. \u201cThe possibility that the Southwest may enter a permanent drought state is not yet widely appreciated,\u201d says Clark. \u201cSea ice in the summer is likely to disappear entirely this century. We don\u2019t know how much sea levels will rise, but we\u2019ve concluded it may be more than previously projected.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201coverarching\u201d recommendation of the report is the need for committed and sustained monitoring of these climatic forces that could trigger abrupt climate changes, the researchers concluded. \u201cWe need to monitor the vital signs of our planet,\u201d Clark said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Climate Report: Look for more drought and melting glaciers, says OSU\u2019s Peter Clark. To a geoscientist, the movie \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d is an outlandish imagining of abrupt climate change, even down to heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal\u2019s geeky heroics in the lead role. But abrupt climate change is not only plausible; it\u2019s likely to occur… Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":189,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687],"tags":[1729,5],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment-and-natural-resources","tag-healthy-planet","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/189"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":670,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions\/670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/spotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}