As we reach the tipping points of climate change, how will our world change? Greenland has already lost 4,700 billion metric tons of ice, an amount that is enough to flood the entire United States in 1.5 feet of water.
Peter D. Ditlevsen is an Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. The institute was founded in 1921 as the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Ditlevsen is a professor in physics of ice, climate, and earth. His fields of interest include climate research, turbulence, meteorology, complex systems, time series analysis, and statistical physics.
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What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?
PETER D. DITLEVSEN
If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.
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The Sahara, which is not really desert, more like savannah, you might be able to change that [through geoengineering], but that's also connected with the monsoon system and all these chaotic systems are very hard to do. But the way we've deforested, the way we've made agriculture, the way we have messed with this planet. I mean, if you look at the biomass in mammals (it's us, it's cows, it's sheep, rhinoceroses, giraffes, whales...it's everything) 96 percent of that mass is human or livestock. That is, to me, an extremely scary number, that wild nature has so little room in our world.
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The big problem we have with climate change is that this is not like any other crisis because it influences all parts of life. I'm a physicist. I like doing experiments. I thought, you know, how terrible would it be for me not eat meat, right? You know, I was used to going home on Friday night, putting on a steak, and a bottle of red wine. That was sort of the easy thing, right? So now, I don't buy an expensive steak. I buy some vegetables that are cheaper, okay? So I have money left over. If I spend that money on an airplane ticket somewhere, then it doesn't really matter. That's the spillover effect.
I think, in our part of the world, and if we are to be frontrunners, we have to crack that nut. We do like to think that our children should have a better world than we grew up in, and they should be better off and so on. So it should be a different kind of wealth, right? The wealth should not be having a large car and a big house and a lot of goods.
