New research says Earth has reached a point of no return in terms of climate control.
By Chris Snelgrove | Updated
What if it’s the end of the world and us no I know it? That’s a possibility put forth by a team of physicists at the University of Porto in Portugal who are studying the effects of human activity on Earth’s climate. According to Learned signalthese researchers found that while we may achieve “climate stabilization at a higher average temperature point than we have now,” the planet may also succumb to “chaotic behavior” that would make future climate events unpredictable and nearly impossible to stabilize the climate.
Details of the team’s research on Earth’s climate were actually published just over a year ago on the arXiv preprint server, but have not yet been peer-reviewed. But if these dire predictions for the planet and the climate are true, we may be fast approaching a tipping point where we either fight climate change or give up trying to stop it. As for the predictions themselves, they are made according to a theory originally used to model superconductivity.
The Ginzburg-Landau theory was originally designed to model superconductivity, and this new team decided to apply that model to Earth’s geologic ages. One such era is the Holocene, which is the phase the planet entered about 11,700 years ago.
Now, more and more scientists are declaring that we are in a new era known as the Anthropocene, which is defined by all the human activity that is making major changes to the Earth.
But how do the Holocene and Anthropocene fit together in a superconductivity model? And how does this help us understand anything about climate development? Once these physicists decided to use the theoretical model of superconductivity, they “applied it to the Anthropocene based on temperature, starting from a Holocene equilibrium point.”
In short, by learning more about our past phase transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, they could better predict what the future will look like when it comes to Earth’s changing climate.
The results were a bit grim. The best case scenario is that we stabilize the climate in the near future before it gets out of control. But at this point, such stabilization would still mean that we end up with a much hotter Earth than it should actually be.
Current heatwaves have already often proved fatal to humans and animals, and between that and the unpredictable weather caused by climate change, the “stable” future looks pretty bleak.
According to the team’s predictions, the alternative is even worse. At some point, Earth may exhibit “chaotic behavior” (not sexy Jurassic Park species) if we don’t stabilize the temperatures in time. This could lead to an increase in fatally unpredictable weather events.
This would make it nearly impossible for the temperature to stabilize again, and it would also make it impossible for our current theoretical models to understand what happens next.
Ultimately, while the research team’s findings about Earth’s climate are frightening, they are not entirely surprising. This research paper adds to the growing scientific evidence from all sides that humanity’s impact on climate change is out of control. And if we don’t start fighting for the future of our planet, then humanity won’t have much of a future left at all.