In response to expanding climate system breakdown, in September 2023, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.”
Since then, a team of scientists have spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of sixteen planetary ‘tipping’ points may have been transgressed, points of no-return beyond which the Earth system could slip into an entirely new state, something it hasn’t experienced in 15 million years, a recent report states.
“The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory” was published last Fall in a journal called One Earth. The GPM spoke with one of its authors.
Katherine Richardson is principal investigator at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She co-authored the groundbreaking 2009 study that introduced the Planetary Boundaries/Safe Operating Space concepts.
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Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Watch our complete conversation here:
Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago.
Doesn’t seem like much.
Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. That target seems to have been exceeded.
In a series of landmark reports published in 2009, 2015 and 2023, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.
Stability landscape for Earth system departing the Holocene (PNAS, used with permission)
The GPM spoke with one of the leading proponents of hothouse Earth science, Will Steffen.
A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. Steffen served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate, and the associated ideas of Planetary Boundaries and Safe Operating Space.
Will Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene.
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Will Steffen passed away in January 2023. The GPM spoke with him in 2018. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Listen to our complete conversation here:
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