1. Information Change Management and Global Warming
Bill St. Arnaud
Bill.st.arnaud@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted all material in this slide deck may be reproduced, modified or distributed without prior permission of the author

2. 3. Global Average Temperature
4. 2010 warmest year ever
5. Global warming since 1970
See the world heating up 1884-2010 in this new NASA animation.http://bit.ly/NasAni
1970-1979
2000-2009
6. CO2 vs Temperature
Rule of Thumb:1C for 10 ppm CO2
7. Rapid Increase in the Greenhouse Gas CO2Since Industrial Era Began
Black Death Allowed Reforestation in Europe and North America reducing CO2
Medieval Warm Period
Little Ice Age
2000
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You are Here
8. Climate Forecasts

MIT report predicts median temperature forecast of 5.2C

9. 11C increase in Northern Canada & Europe 10. http://globalchange.mit.edu/pubs/abstract.php?publication_id=990 11. Last Ice age average global temperature was 5-6C cooler than today 12. Most of Canada & Europe was under 2-3 km ice 13. Nearly 90 per cent of new scientific findings reveal global climate disruption to be worse, and progressing more rapidly, than expected. 14. http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Freudenburg_2010_ASC.pdfMIT
15. Climate Change is not reversible
Climate Change is not like acid rain, water management or ozone destruction where environment will quickly return to normal once source of pollution is removed
GHG emissions will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years and continue to accumulate
Planet will continue to warm up even if we drastically reduce emissions
Weaver et al., GRL (2007)
All we hope to achieve is to slow down the rapid rate of climate change
16. CO2 Residence Time
17. Climate tipping points
USGS report finds that future climate shifts have been underestimated and warns of debilitatingabrupt shift in climate that would be devastating.
Tipping elements in the Earth's climate- National Academies of Science
Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic climate change.
18. Future Droughts

Palmer Drought Severity Index, or PDSI.

19. The most severe drought in recent history, in the Sahel region of western Africa in the 1970s, had a PDSI of -3 or -4. 20. By 2030 Western USA could see -4 to -6 21. By 2100 some parts of the U.S. could see -8 to -10 PDSI, while Mediterranean areas could see drought in the -15 or -20 range.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39741525/ns/us_news-environment/
22. Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS)

Sits on land below sea level

23. Can easily break up once sea water gets under ice 24. Originally thought that breakup would take hundreds of years 25. New evidence indicates that breakup will happen within 40 years when planet warms up 1C (we are already up .8C) 26. S ea levels would be 3.3m 4.8m 27. Ice collapsed as recent as 125,000 years ago 28. IPCC says ice is one of the poorest understood areashttp://news.discovery.com/earth/how-stable-is-the-west-antarctic-ice-sheet.html
29. Ice sheets disappearing 100 years ahead of schedule
Projected Sea Rise
Ice sheets disappearing 100 years ahead of schedule
http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/15/deep-ocean-heat-is-rapidly-melting-antarctic-ice-global-warmin/
Sea levels may rise 3x faster than predicted by IPCC
http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/09/sea-level-rise-six-feet-three-times-faster-than-the-ipcc-estimat/
30. Dramatic changes in precipitation

Every continent has suffered record rainfalls

31. Rains submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, a thousand-year deluge swamped Nashville and storms just north of Rio caused the deadliest landslides Brazil has ever seen. 32. Observed increase in precipitation in the last few decades has been due in large part to a disproportionate increase in heavy and extreme precipitation rates which are exceeding predictions made in models