Unit 5: Climate Change Models Now and in the Future
Unit 5: Climate Change Models Now and in the Future
Introduction to Unit 5
In this unit we will be listening to a presentation by Richard Hebda, who served as Curator (Botany and Earth History) at the Royal British Columbia Museum for 38 years and adjunct faculty at the University of Victoria for 33 years.
The purpose of this unit is to understand…
- The complexity of the climate in BC and how it is changing
- How the climate is influencing your work
- Ways that you can assist in adapting to the impacts of climate change
Learning Objectives
After successfully completing this unit, you will be able to:
- Understand changing climate situation in BC
- Predict what will happen with ecosystem change response
Video attribution: “Hebda 2020 Dynamic Ecosystems compressed” is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Summary of Key Points
Over the next century, plants and animals on land in BC might be in for a wild and ultimately devastating ride. Warming temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather and climate events are likely to increase at a rate and magnitude not seen in more than 65 million years. Global surface temperatures have risen about twice as fast over land as they have over the ocean, a trend likely to continue into the next century. Based on current emissions trajectories, temperatures are projected to rise as much as 90 F over much of the Earth’s land. The last time that the Earth warmed that much was around 55 million years ago, and it did so over a period of 10,000 years. The projected change over the next century provides a small window in which life on Earth, including humans, will need to adapt to a similar change in temperatures.
The global climatic system is a series of connections between the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, the biosphere and the sociosphere – us humans. This global climatic system has been disrupted through huge impacts by humans, and is no longer in equilibrium. This dis-equilibrium is now causing the extreme weather and climate events that are the subject of evening news stories around the globe. For example, in the past 6 months in British Columbia, we have experienced the driest November on record, the wettest January on record, the fifth driest March on record and the driest April on record. Ecosystems and the species that compose them are now subjected to dramatic swings away from ‘normal’ climatic conditions and are in the process of adaptation. The changing climatic conditions will favour some plant and animal species and discourage others; some plant and animal species will be able to expand and occupy newly favourable habitats, while others will not have that ability, and may disappear.
The relationship between ecosystems and climate in BC is a complicated one, because BC has the highest level of ecological biodiversity in the country. The climate models that are being developed for the province cannot easily predict the impacts of changing climatic conditions on the wide range