Five Degrees

The big issue brought up in five degrees is the problem of habitability. Several themes mentioned in previous chapters continue to deteriorate in five degrees.

The various issues are as follows:

•     No ice sheets will remain as melting becomes inevitable.
•     Rain forests shrink or completely disappear (Like Dr. Karowe spoke of biome switches, so rain forests turning into savannas etc.)
•        Sea levels continue to rise; meaning floods increase.
•        Droughts as geographical areas such as the Sahara, Kalahari, Western Sahel etc. expand.
•         Inland temperatures raise more than 10⁰
•          New deserts will form because of these inland temperature changes and expansion of deserts in places in East Africa, Chile, Southern Europe etc.
•           Not all places will lose the ability to grow food or continue to be bread baskets, but places that are lucky won’t be able to feed the entire population. These places include Russia and Canada.
•           Methane hydrates will increase due to ocean temperature increase meaning more greenhouse gases. It is at 5 degrees Lyman believes that is where we reach the point of no return.

Habitable zones

The issue that was brought up, that was interesting to me was the idea of habitability. Dr. Tim Palmer used an example in class of increasing sea levels in Miami, will allow people to still move inland. Though places like Bangladesh, there is no more inland space that will be habitable and therefore that will cause refugee crises, even wars over resources such as land. I believe sometimes we forget the earth is finite and has its own boundaries and yes, even with technology we cannot make all space on earth habitable. Therefore, climate change should be an alerting issue.

Here is an interesting article on habitability, its where I pulled the graph from. I also posted this sea level video as a response to a previous blog but I think it drives home how devastating these degree increases will be!