• Question: How big a problem is global warming? How long will it be until it's very serious?!

    Asked by annarisbridger to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 28 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by charlotteu1996.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi annarisbridger,

      This is more James P and Nuala’s area of expertise, but I think most scientists agree that global warming could be a massive problem. How long until things get serious depends very much on how we respond to the problem. If we can start rapidly reducing carbon emissions in the next 10 to 20 years, then we should be ok. If we carry on as we are now, then within 100 years we could be seeing some pretty serious issues!

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi annarisbridger,

      Global warming is the single biggest issue affecting the planet today and it will continue to affect the planet for the next 1000 years at the very least. Without putting pressure on you guys, it is your generation along with the generation of myself, James V, Nuala, Gemma & Davie, that will make the decisions in the next 20 years that determine how bad it gets over the next 100 to 1000 years.

      If we act now, and quickly we can limit the warming to not being too serious, we will have about 2°C of warming on average over the whole planet and while this isn’t great, it won’t cause major food systems or water supply systems to many problems. If we don’t act then warming could be 6°C or more and from this we could see billions of people having to leave the continent of Africa, the sub continent of India, large chunks of China and parts of the USA as they won’t be able to live there by 2100 as they won’t be able to grow enough food or have enough drinking water.

      Worst of all with global warming, the biggest impacts are also felt by nature, so the plants and animals that have done nothing wrong, that live in balance with the planet which could be made to go extinct by global warming. The Amazon rainforest in particular is probably really vulnerable to global warming and will dry out and die back (get smaller) til potentially it is all gone and replaced by desert, if we let global warming get too severe.

      We will end up somewhere between these two extreme scenarios, but I would expect we will start to really notice the effects of global warming on our weather in the next 15-25 years, we will start to see some serious issues from climate change in about 50 years time and in 70-100 years time, then climate change will be really serious, unless we act now to stop this happening.

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