Mountain climate change during the past warmest age: results from recent ERL publication
A recent work on Mountain climate change during the past warmest climate has been published in Environmental Research Letters by IOP Publishing. A few results from it are highlighted on the occasion of this International Mountain Day.
Changing mountain climate is one of the most critical matters in the global warming context. Elevation-dependent warming is the mountain phenomenon in which warming rates increase with increasing elevation. Consequently, we expect warming would be higher at high elevations than at corresponding lower elevations under climate change. As a result, it would influence not only our atmosphere but also the environment, including forests, biodiversity, humans, etc.
This study demonstrated elevation-dependent temperature features in the Eocene hothouse. The Eocene is considered a replica of the future climate in an epoch with high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Therefore, if we know the past, we can predict and understand future climate. Worldwide mountain's response to carbon dioxide has been inspected via proxy-based paleoclimate simulation. The combination of feedback was explainable for these temperature changes during the early Eocene.
This study also has remarkable results, especially future paradox; it shows disagreement with current future explorations. The authors argued that we expect warming at low elevations in future projections. This might be good news for mountain summits; however, future low-level warming in the mountains needs to be investigated for social security. Hopefully, these results will be valuable in understanding our mountain climate and climate change.
Pratik Kad, Manuel Blau, Kyung-Ja Ha, and Jiang Zhu 2022 Environ. Res. Lett. 17 114038 10.1088/1748-9326/ac9c74