Review evidence that the Global Ecosystem is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence

An old Science report that predicted the temperature rise levels for years to come back in 1975. Its predictions are correct and it further explores what may go wrong in the case of a pronunced global warming.

Meeting the Paris targets requires reducing both fossil fuel demand and supply, and closing the “production gap” between climate targets and energy policy. But there is no supply-side mitigation roadmap yet. We need criteria to decide where to focus efforts.

Here, we identify the 425 biggest fossil fuel extraction projects globally (defined as >1 gigaton potential CO2 emissions). We list these “carbon bombs” by name, show in which countries they are located and calculate their potential emissions which combined exceed the global 1.5 °C carbon budget by a factor of two. Already producing carbon bombs account for a significant percentage of global fossil fuel extraction. But 40% of carbon bombs have not yet started extraction.

Climate change mitigation efforts cannot ignore carbon bombs. Defusing them could become an important dimension of climate change mitigation policy and activism towards meeting the Paris targets. So far, few actors, mainly from civil society, are working on defusing carbon bombs, but they are focussing on a very limited number of them. We outline a priority agenda where the key strategies are avoiding the activation of new carbon bombs and putting existing ones into “harvest mode”.

The authors used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomassusing Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna. Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flyinginsect biomass over the 27 years of study.

We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in abundance of species depending on insects as a foodsource, and ecosystem functioning in the European landscape.

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs, originally published in 2004 to show socio-economic and Earth System trends from 1750 to 2000, have now been updated to 2010. In the graphs of socio-economic trends, where the data permit, the activity of the wealthy (OECD) countries, those countries with emerging economies, and the rest of the world have now been differentiated.

The dominant feature of the socio-economic trends is that the economic activity of the human enterprise continues to grow at a rapid rate. However, the differentiated graphs clearly show that strong equity issues are masked by considering global aggregates only. Most of the population growth since 1950 has been in the non-OECD world but the world’s economy (GDP), and hence consumption, is still strongly dominated by the OECD world.

The Earth System indicators, in general, continued their long-term, post-industrial rise, although a few, such as atmospheric methane concentration and stratospheric ozone loss, showed a slowing or apparent stabilisation over the past decade.

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced.

A psychological approach to answer the question : Why Climate Change does not scare us yet ?