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2014 was the hottest year on record. All indications are that 2015 will break that record. According to numbers released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) across all land and ocean surfaces the average temperature was up 1.24 degrees F over the 20th Century average.
NASA released a similar report last week as did the Japan Meteorological Agency.
These reports come on top of a Reuters report assessing a new study released today in the journal Nature by the Stockholm Resilience Center that says that four of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed. The Center had previously (2009) indicated that science shows that these nine processes and systems regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth System – the interactions of land, ocean, atmosphere and life that together provide conditions upon which our societies depend. The four that are now crossed are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these “core boundaries” would “drive the Earth System into a new and less hospitable to humans state”.
Climate change, extinctions signal Earth in danger zone: study
by Alister Doyle Reuters 15 January 2015
Climate change and high rates of extinctions of animals and plants are pushing the Earth into a danger zone for humanity, a scientific report card about mankind’s impact on nature said on Thursday.
An international team of 18 experts, expanding on a 2009 report about “planetary boundaries” for safe human use, also sounded the alarm about clearance of forests and pollution from nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers.
“I don’t think we’ve broken the planet but we are creating a much more difficult world,” Sarah Cornell, one of the authors at the Stockholm Resilience Centre which led the project as a guide to human exploitation of the Earth, told Reuters.
Read the Stockholm Resilience Center Abstract Planetary Boundaries 2.0 new and improved here
Connecting the (local) Dots-
Last Spring GreenWatch News covered the International Joint Commission report “A Balanced Diet for Lake Erie”, that chronicles the recent and precipitous decline of our Lake. The report makes recommendations that the lake be declared “Impaired”. Several of the recommendations including fining ways to decrease the rapidly expanding industrial agricultural use of polluting chemical fertilizers are responsible for the rapid decline which has lead to widening dead zones in Lake Erie.
Read about the menace in our own front yard here.
GreenWatchNews 