A new study published in Nature found that the deforestation of the Amazon is directly linked to the melting of W. Antarctica’s ice and reduced snowfall in the Tibetan Plateau. One of the many fears of climatologists is that when one critical component of the earth system shifts abruptly and irreversibly ( aka a tipping point), other climate system components also tip. The phenomenon is known as the Domino effect.
Earth has fifteen climatic tipping points, nine activated over the past ten years. Some of the nine activated have already tipped, including Greenland and W Antarctica. The remaining seven are the Amazon Rainforest, Arctic sea ice, Atlantic Ocean circulation, Boreal (Taiga) forests, Coral Reefs, permafrost, and a part of East Antarctica, if the study is correct, the Tibetan Plateau, which provides fresh water for billions of people in Asia will increasing melt as the smoke from the Amazon is carried to the plateau by winds that warm the atmosphere.
The fossil fuel emissions that we continue to pour into the atmosphere are to blame for the possible exception of the Amazon rainforest and other tropical carbon sinks that are being logged, mined, and burned. Increasingly, the interconnectivity of the various tipping points is being discussed and researched. The science is still lacking, but paleoclimatology adds value to the conversation.
Mongabay does an excellent job of translating the study into plain English.
Claire Asher writes:
The research team identified a strong correlation between temperature anomalies — where regional conditions buck the global trend — in the Amazon Rainforest and the Tibetan Plateau, roughly 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles) distant. These anomalies allowed the authors to distinguish between the global trend of climatic warming and direct climate connections between distant regions.
The data showed that anomalously warm temperatures in the Amazon and Tibet have coincided over the last 40 years. They found a similar relationship between temperature in the Amazon and on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a key tipping element in Earth’s climate system.
Simulations of future climate change carried out by the researchers indicated that these connections are likely to be maintained to 2100. These computer models also showed that future extreme climate events in the Amazon and the Tibetan Plateau are likely to be synchronized.
This mathematical study demonstrated that “if you lost the Amazon [biome,] or if you disrupt the Amazon, there’s further knock-on implications elsewhere in the world,” said Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., who was not involved in the study. “Any advance in credibly mapping out these couplings between tipping elements gives us a richer picture of the kind of non-linear coupled dynamics of the Earth as a system.” Scientists agree that precisely detecting actual tipping points is impossible until you’ve passed through them, and can only be fully confirmed in hindsight.
The water-cycling capabilities of forests are responsible for generating roughly half the annual rainfall in the Amazon. But concerns have grown that with continued loss and degradation of the rainforest due to human activities, the Amazon biome is transitioning into a new, drier state, potentially causing the remaining forest to die out and be replaced by savanna, with profound rippling impacts for the global climate system.
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The researchers found evidence that “snow cover in the Tibetan Plateau has been losing stability since 2008, which implies that [it] is an activated tipping element,” said Liu. While the Tibetan Plateau may be close to its tipping point, “we don’t know what kind of new state the Tibetan Plateau will remain in if it crosses the threshold,” Fan warned.
The linked study in the first paragraph shows a larger view of the schematic.
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Where is the fucking media?