Abstract
Human-caused climate change worsens with every increment of additional warming, although some impacts can develop abruptly. The potential for abrupt changes is far less understood in the Antarctic compared with the Arctic, but evidence is emerging for rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes in the Antarctic environment. A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea-ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects is more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversible than Arctic sea-ice loss. A marked slowdown in Antarctic Overturning Circulation is expected to intensify this century and may be faster than the anticipated Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown. The tipping point for unstoppable ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be exceeded even under best-case CO2 emission reduction pathways, potentially initiating global tipping cascades. Regime shifts are occurring in Antarctic and Southern Ocean biological systems through habitat transformation or exceedance of physiological thresholds, and compounding breeding failures are increasing extinction risk. Amplifying feedbacks are common between these abrupt changes in the Antarctic environment, and stabilizing Earth’s climate with minimal overshoot of 1.5 °C will be imperative alongside global adaptation measures to minimise and prepare for the far-reaching impacts of Antarctic and Southern Ocean abrupt changes.
When it all finally collapses, I hope we as a society can come together to round up and execute all the pudding brains and evil people who continued to ignore the decades signs because of their own ego and stubbornness.
Since we already failed, can we not start geoengineering the club mate, fuck we basically already engineered it to this point. Heck we clearly aren’t making the changes in time, so why destroy environments before we change, let’s buy us some time.
Stratospheric Aerosol injection could be a game changer, showing governments we aren’t doing enough, we now are playing with fire to try and give us a last chance. But at least we could semi undue the worst for a while
“1001 cars long”
and stabilizing Earth’s climate with minimal overshoot of 1.5 °C
Oh, we have accelerated past 1.5℃ already… that’s now solidly in our rear view mirror.