Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found.
The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe.
Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications.
The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined by heat, the resulting damage could prove impossible to undo — even if temperatures are successfully brought down later in the 21st century.
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