World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

A new research paper, entitled “Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers”, was just published and it is truly a depressing report. Most climate change studies have looked at changes in human behavior that directly impact the environment. This particular study analyzes how some of these changes actually accelerates the process of change and its conclusion is that

“We conduct experiments on four models that simulate abrupt changes in the Chilika lagoon fishery, the Easter Island community, forest dieback and lake water quality—representing ecosystems with a range of anthropogenic interactions. Collapses occur sooner under increasing levels of primary stress but additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise in all four models bring the collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%. “

This conclusion is somewhat problematic since the model used is new and has not yet been employed by other researchers. My own thinking, however, closely parallels the logic of the paper. Moreover, the study uses four actual case studies of environmental degradation (the Chilika lagoon fishery, the Easter Island community, Lake Phosphorus, and forest dieback that matches the dynamic acceleration of climate change).

The researchers outline the significant differences between their model and previous climate change models:

“Previous studies of interactions between tipping elements have focused on large-scale systems and suggest substantial social and economic costs from the second half of the twenty-first century onwards^42,56. Our findings suggest the potential for these costs to occur sooner. For example, it is not clear whether the IPCC estimate for a tipping point in the Amazon forest before 2100 (ref. ¹¹) includes the possibility for interacting drivers and/or noise; if not, our findings suggest that a breakdown may occur several decades earlier (Supplementary Introduction). This would occur where local-scale failures in elements (such as species populations, fish stocks, crop yields and water resources) combine with more extreme events (such as wildfires and droughts) to precondition the large-scale system, already vulnerable to the influence of other large-scale tipping elements, to collapse earlier—a meeting of top-down and bottom-up forces (Supplementary Introduction). This vertical integration of forces is reinforced by the rising trend in global warming that already represents a spatial integrator which may be expected to strengthen before it subsides.”

Even though we already have substantial evidence that climate change is already occurring, the troubling conclusion is that the more horrific consequences of climate change will unfold even earlier than previous studies have suggested.