What is “abrupt climate change”?

Posted on January 31, 2011 in What is RCC

To ordinary people living their lives, today’s global warming is imperceptible, and even the effects – changes in weather, in growing seasons, and so on – take hold gradually. The most dramatic recent predictions, from MIT and others, are for 10F – that’s 6C – of warming this century. While this would change life as we know it, it’s still “only” an average change of about 1F per decade; not a really earth-shaking deal in any specific ten-year period. The effects come from the accumulation of warming, one decade after the next.

There is a kind of climate change, though, that would be far more immediate in its impact. Abrupt climate change (Wikipedia entry here) is a sudden increase of anywhere from 2C to, perhaps, 10C of warming – that’s 3F to 16F – in about one to three years. Even at the low end, abrupt climate change would disrupt rainfall and change temperatures so much that getting the harvest in at today’s levels would be impossible, and widespread starvation would be almost impossible to avoid. Wars and more or less widespread breakdowns of order would probably ensue. At the higher end of the scale, the impact would be many times worse.