Cameron Wake at UNH has been warning about climate change for a couple of decades – his reports were the first to make me realize the severity of the situation in the early 2000’s – and he’s still at it. Because climate change is still at it; in fact, it’s happening more quickly than we thought it would.
“This is not something that is just a problem for the future,” says Cameron Wake, research professor in climatology and glaciology and an author of the 2021 New Hampshire Climate Assessment Report, along with fellow UNH researchers, Elizabeth Burakowski and state climatologist Mary Lemcke-Stampone. “Human driven climate change is happening now and we’re at a critical crossroads. “Those trends could get exponentially worse if we don’t take some action to slow the process and rapidly decrease emissions.”
The report looked at data from 10 communities around New Hampshire, from Colebrook to Keene to the Seacoast, and offers not only the science behind these projections but forecasts what would happen if significant emission reduction were pursued. It highlights how different warming scenarios could tip the delicate balance in ecosystems, noting the potential increase in the number of invasive species and disease-carrying insects which could be an issue for both wildlife and humans.
That’s from this article by UNH Research News.
Return to the Concord Monitor
Dr Cameron Wake and NH State Climatologist Dr Mary Stimpon offered a sneak peak of the conclusions of this report in a “New Climate Normals for New Hampshire” event sponsored by the New Hampshire Network. You can find a recoding at http://newhampshirenetwork.org/events.
Following that, the NH Network sponsored a climate solutions event, featuring an En-ROADS climate policy simulator demonstration and a talk by Dartmouth College Economics Professor Charles Wheelan about the underlying market failure and the most efficient and equitable way to address that problem (border-adjusted cash-back carbon pricing).
A recording of that event, “Is Net-Zero by 2050 Possible?” is also available at http://newhampshirenetwork.org/events.
Please tell Congress you want immediate action at http://cclusa.org/write, and if your town is not yet on the list of (37 NH) towns that have passed “A Resolution to Take Action on Climate Pollution” at town meeting, please consider putting it on your town’s next warrant at http://carboncashback.org.
Thanks!
“Those trends could get exponentially worse…”
This is something I’d expect to hear from a journalist who can’t tell the difference between an exponential and a logarithm.
In the actual report at https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=sustainability there is no mention of “exponential” or “exponent.” The closest match is for “expo” in exposure.
The only graphs that have a hint of an exponential curve are for projections for the RCP8.5 pathway that even NASA GISS is recommending that people back away from it. Even before the IPCC’s AR6 report, alarmist scientists were concerned with its excesses https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-00177-3/d41586-020-00177-3.pdf says “We must all — from physical scientists and climate-impact modellers to communicators and policymakers — stop presenting the worst-case scenario as the most likely one.”
The report makes no mention of factors other than anthropogenic CO2 release. Nothing about land use changes, a big one. Nothing about the AMO, the Atlantic Multidecal Oscillation that suppressed Atlantic tropical storms in its negative mode – it last went positive in 1995, a rather extreme tropical season that year.
Please, take _anything_ from Cameron Wake with a large dose skepticism. He is so wedded to CO2 as a demon gas that can’t recall the last paper from him that considered other climate drivers.
“exponentially” has entered the English language in a general context meaning, basically, “growing wicked fast” – like “decimated” it is no longer confined to the strict mathematical meaning