Mitte September 2016 erschien im Elsevier-Verlag das neue Fachbuch „Evidence-Based Climate Science: Data Opposing CO2 Emissions as the Primary Source of Global Warming„. Der Schwerpunkt des Peer-Review-begutachteten Buches liegt auf der natürlichen Klimadynamik, die in den aktuellen IPCC-Klimamodellen leider noch immer nicht ausreichend berücksichtigt ist. Herausgeber des Buches ist der Glazial-Geologe Don Easterbrook, Western Washington University.
Das Buch besteht aus 21 Artikeln verschiedener Autorengruppen, darunter auch ein Paper von Sebastian Lüning und Fritz Vahrenholt, in dem es um die klimatische Wirkung von Sonnenaktivitätsschwankungen geht. Insbesondere gibt das Paper eine Übersicht über den Kenntnisstand zu möglicherweise solar-angetriebenen klimatischen Millenniumszyklen, die mittlerweile durch Fallstudien aus allen Kontinenten und Klimazonen beschrieben worden sind. Im Folgenden die Kurzfassung des Papers:
The Sun’s Role in Climate
By Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt
Millennial-scale climate variability is a globally well-established Holocene phenomenon described for all oceans and continents. Cycles are known from upper, middle, and lower latitudes, encompassing all climate zones from the Arctic to the tropics. The amplitude of the observed temperature fluctuations is often more than 1°C and thus has a similar or even greater range than the warming that has occurred since the Little Ice Age. Furthermore, many of these Holocene, natural climate fluctuations show the same level of abruptness as the 20th-century warming.
A common characteristic of many of the documented millennial climate fluctuations is their good match with solar activity changes, as well as a North Atlantic climate record by Bond et al. (2001). Besides solar activity changes, internal millennial ocean cycles may have contributed to the observed climate oscillations. Both solar and internal climate system autocyclical drivers are not yet fully implemented in the current climate models, which still do not manage to reproduce the variable Holocene climate development. Yet successful hindcast capability is generally considered a prerequisite that qualifies models to be used for modeling of future climate.
This chapter reviews Holocene millennial-scale climate fluctuations as reported in 64 papers worldwide. Future research needs to attempt a detailed correlation of the existing Holocene climate curves, complemented by additional data sets filling gaps in currently poorly documented regions. A good understanding of global Holocene millennial- and centennial scale climate variability and its possible solar forcing is required as a calibration basis for a new generation of climate models that should have the objective to reliably reproduce past climate change before attempting detailed future simulations.
Das Buch ist bei Amazon erhältlich, kann aber auch im Elsevier-Webstore bestellt werden.
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Spannender Beitrag auf UnserTirol am 14. September 2016:
Klimawandel gab’s schon mal
Archäologen sind sich sicher: Vor 5.000 Jahren war es bei uns deutlich wärmer als heute.
Am 25. und 26. August [2016] fand im Mandron-See (2.409m, Adamello-Gruppe) eine Expedition zur Lokalisierung und Dokumentation eines Bootes aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg statt. Dabei entdeckte der Taucher Nicola Bonisegna vom NauticaMare DiveTeam aus Verona einen einzelnen Baumstamm mit Wurzelansatz am Grund des Gletschersees. […] Die Überraschung war groß, als sich herausstellte, dass der Baum fast 5000 Jahre alt ist. […] Die Erforschung des Paläoklimas in den Alpen hat mit der zunehmenden Klimaerwärmung große Bedeutung erlangt. Auch in Süd-Tirol lassen archäologische Funde in großer Höhe schon seit längerem vermuten, dass es in der Vergangenheit schon mehrmals wärmer war, als heute.
Ganzen Artikel auf UnserTirol lesen.
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Während sich alle Welt auf die vermeintliche Klimakatastrophe konzentriert, bleiben andere wichtigere Probleme weitgehend unbeachtet. So beklagte sich die Wildlife Conservation Society am 9. September 2016, dass seit den 1990er Jahren etwa ein Zehntel der gesamten Wildnisflächen der Erde klamm und heimlich verschwunden sind, eine ökologische Katastrophe für die sich kaum jemand zu interessieren scheint. Am stärksten von diesen Verlusten betroffen sind der Amazonas Regenwald sowie Zentralafrika. Es werden dringend internationale politische Anstrengungen ähnlich dem IPCC benötigt, um das Problem aktiv anzugehen. Im Folgenden die Pressemitteilung der Wildlife Conservation Society:
A Tenth of the World’s Wilderness Lost since the 1990s
Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biologyshow catastrophic declines in wilderness areas around the world over the last 20 years. They demonstrate alarming losses comprising a tenth of global wilderness since the 1990s – an area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon. The Amazon and Central Africa have been hardest hit. The findings underscore an immediate need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness areas and to address the unprecedented threats they face, the researchers say.
“Globally important wilderness areas—despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalized communities—are completely ignored in environmental policy,” says Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. “Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development. We probably have one to two decades to turn this around. International policy mechanisms must recognize the actions needed to maintain wilderness areas before it is too late.“
Watson says much policy attention has been paid to the loss of species, but comparatively little was known about larger-scale losses of entire ecosystems, especially wilderness areas which tend to be relatively understudied. To fill that gap, the researchers mapped wilderness areas around the globe, with “wilderness” being defined as biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance. The researchers then compared their current map of wilderness to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s.
This comparison showed that a total of 30.1 million km2 (around 20 percent of the world’s land area) now remains as wilderness, with the majority being located in North America, North Asia, North Africa, and the Australian continent. However, comparisons between the two maps show that an estimated 3.3 million km2 (almost 10 percent) of wilderness area has been lost in the intervening years. Those losses have occurred primarily in South America, which has experienced a 30 percent decline in wilderness, and Africa, which has experienced a 14 percent loss.
“The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering” Dr Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Colombia. “We need to recognize that wilderness areas, which we’ve foolishly considered to be de-facto protected due to their remoteness, is actually being dramatically lost around the world. Without proactive global interventions we could lose the last jewels in nature’s crown. You cannot restore wilderness, once it is gone, and the ecological process that underpin these ecosystems are gone, and it never comes back to the state it was. The only option is to proactively protect what is left”.
Watson says that the United Nations and others have ignored globally significant wilderness areas in key multilateral environmental agreements and this must change. “If we don’t act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet,” Watson says. “We have a duty to act for our children and their children.”
Watson et al.: “Catastrophic Declines in Wilderness Areas Undermine Global Environment Targets” http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30993-9 /
Greenpeace und Kurier berichteten dankenswerterweise über die Studie.