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Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
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Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. ... But today, for the first time, humanity’s global civilization—the worldwide,increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of
environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signsof rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption.
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Climate Change Hot Spots Mapped Across the United States
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Taking some of the fuzziness out of climate models is revealing the uneven U.S. impact of future global warming; the most severely affected region may be emerging already
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A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere
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Terrestrial net primary (plant) production provides a measurable boundary for human consumption of Earth’s biological resources.
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Early Warnings of Regime Shifts: A Whole-Ecosystem Experiment
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Catastrophic ecological regime shifts may be announced in advance by statistical early warning signals such as slowing return rates from perturbation and rising variance. The theoretical background for these indicators is rich, but real-world tests are rare, especially for whole ecosystems. We tested the hypothesis that these statistics would be early warning signals for an experimentally induced regime shift in an aquatic food web. We gradually added top predators to a lake over 3 years to destabilize its food web. An adjacent lake was monitored simultaneously as a reference ecosystem. Warning signals of a regime shift were evident in the manipulated lake during reorganization of the food web more than a year before the food web transition was complete, corroborating theory for leading indicators of ecological regime shifts.
Critical slowing down
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Biodiversity in a Warmer World
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A new framework helps to understand how species ranges change under global warming.
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Complexity of Coupled Human and Natural Systems
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Integrated studies of coupled human and natural systems reveal new and complex patterns and processes not evident when studied by social or natural scientists separately. Synthesis of six case studies from around the world shows that couplings between human and natural systems vary across space, time, and organizational units. They also exhibit nonlinear dynamics with thresholds, reciprocal feedback loops, time lags, resilience, heterogeneity, and surprises. Furthermore, past couplings have legacy effects on present conditions and future possibilities.
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Amid Worrisome Signs of Warming, ‘Climate Fatigue’ Sets In
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As scientists debate whether climate is changing faster than anticipated, some worry that a
drumbeat of dire warnings may be helping to erode U.S. public concerns about global warming
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Biodiversity and Climate Change
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Efforts to elucidate the effect of climate change on biodiversity with detailed data sets and refined models reach novel conclusions.
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Drought Sensitivity of the Amazon Rainforest
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Amazon forests are a key but poorly understood component of the global carbon cycle. If, as
anticipated, they dry this century, they might accelerate climate change through carbon losses and
changed surface energy balances. We used records from multiple long-term monitoring plots across
Amazonia to assess forest responses to the intense 2005 drought, a possible analog of future events.
Affected forest lost biomass, reversing a large long-term carbon sink, with the greatest impacts
observed where the dry season was unusually intense. Relative to pre-2005 conditions, forest subjected
to a 100-millimeter increase in water deficit lost 5.3 megagrams of aboveground biomass of carbon per
hectare. The drought had a total biomass carbon impact of 1.2 to 1.6 petagrams (1.2 × 1015 to
1.6 × 1015 grams). Amazon forests therefore appear vulnerable to increasing moisture stress, with the
potential for large carbon losses to exert feedback on climate change.
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A Determination of the Cloud Feedback from Climate Variations over the Past Decade
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Estimates of Earth's climate sensitivity are uncertain, largely because of uncertainty in the
long-term cloud feedback. I estimated the magnitude of the cloud feedback in response to short-term
climate variations by analyzing the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget from March 2000 to February
2010. Over this period, the short-term cloud feedback had a magnitude of 0.54 T 0.74 (2s) watts
per square meter per kelvin, meaning that it is likely positive. A small negative feedback is possible,
but one large enough to cancel the climate’s positive feedbacks is not supported by these observations.
Both long- and short-wave components of short-term cloud feedback are also likely positive.
Calculations of short-term cloud feedback in climate models yield a similar feedback. I find no
correlation in the models between the short- and long-term cloud feedbacks.
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