Our earth is a pretty complex system.
If individual elements are significantly changed, this can lead to violent and unforeseeable reactions.
Climate change is causing such changes and unbalancing nature.
Ice sheets are melting, forests are drying up, coral reefs are dying - and yet: so far, the consequences for the planet still seem manageable.
However, it is not clear how much longer.
Some components of the planetary climate system are already facing a critical point. If this is exceeded, a chain reaction could result and accelerate global warming to an uncontrolled extent. This creates self-reinforcing processes that can hardly be reversed by countermeasures. Just as a house of cards collapses from which one draws a card, our climate could "tilt" if so-called tipping points are exceeded.
The sea ice in particular is threatened by the rising temperatures and its condition could reach such a critical point soon.
As a central part of our climate and ecosystem, the earth's ice surfaces ensure the ice-albedo feedback: Sun rays are reflected back into space by ice and snow.
If the ice melts due to global warming, it can no longer reflect the radiation and the earth continues to heat up.
The climate physicist Torsten Albrecht from the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam calculates when the ice could reach its tipping point.
On the podcast, he says we could see an ice-free Arctic in the not too distant future:
“With sea ice, we've lost around 40 percent of its area since the 1980s.
You can even turn it down to such an extent that you can say: for every ton of CO₂, around three square meters of sea ice disappear.
In the last assessment report, the IPCC summarized this in such a way that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2050 at the latest, "said Albrecht.
The melting of the polar circles would not only increase global warming.
According to Torsten Albrecht, the consequences would be fatal, especially for coastal cities, if the ice shield were removed;
for example because of the rise in sea level:
“Many megacities are right on the coast and cannot be so easily protected with dams.
Storms that have happened every 100 years in the past could then happen every year in the future.
So an event of the century will then increasingly become an annual event, this is how it can be represented statistically, for example. "
In this episode of »Climate Report«, our podcast on the climate crisis, we ask ourselves the following questions: How could our climate change?
What are the consequences and where are we already today?
This time our guest is: the climate physicist Torsten Albrecht from the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam.
Dear listeners, we are interested in your opinion.
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