Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises.

Some one needs more money…..

I sometimes wonder if the audiences that attend these things are made up of more realists than believers now – just trying to keep an eye on what the dastards are up to. Sometimes I even fantasize that the percentage of realists to believers grows with each event and one day, to everyone’s surprise, it will come out that the entire audience is made up of realists.
The alarmists will feel lonely on the podium then.
Okay, maybe I don’t get out enough.

Enough of this public funded nonsense – to all expected attendees, cancel this meeting, get a job and start contributing something of value to your community!

‘………. the likelihood of various physical components of the Earth system undergoing major and rapid changes (e.g., a shutdown of ocean circulation, ice sheet disintegration, etc.)……….’
They seem to use the good ol’ term – ‘global warming’ – very sparingly these days.

CRS, DrPH says:
December 2, 2013 at 11:45 pm
…if they want to be surprised, let’s see how they react if we get another Carrington Event-class solar flare. Talk about abrupt impacts….
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The only way you will be able to see their surprise, is to Walk there and look. Or get a horse. Nothing else is going to be moving.

Pardon us for our abruptness, but we have invented many clever computer simulations to separate you from your hard earned cash…

A.D. Everard says:
December 2, 2013 at 11:37 pm
“I sometimes wonder if the audiences that attend these things are made up of more realists than believers now”
I believe it’s called a Preference Cascade, or Preference Falsification. Decent coverage of it in this pdf from the Cato Institute, http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2003/12/v26n4-2.pdf

“Are they going to institute a worldwide cold-weather campaign to collect thermal sleeping bags for those hundreds of thousands of Europeans who will be freezing in the coming winters?” asks BW2013. What makes him/her think that North America will not suffer at least as badly?

What about a mutated virus or bacteria immune to all treatment? Or an asteroid strike? Or Yellowstone erupting again? Or a major earthquake resulting in a 200 Ft high tsunami? All of which, I suspect, are more likely in the next 100 years than what they will be discussing. There are an infinite number of possible disasters out their just waiting but come on, if we spend even 1 minute and $1 on each one we will run out of time and money before we get to them all. They should get a life.

When are these people going to learn that we live on a ever changing planet? No matter if it’s the climate, the sea, or the land that we walk on, it is always changing. Nothing in the physical world stays the same, like they wished it would. Somethings change slowly, somethings change fast & most change at a variable pace. They get all excited everytime they see any variation in the most minute metric & it makes them look like the small minded idiots that they are. This is so much FUN watching these people & Al Gore crash & burn. Mother Nature is not cooperating with them!!!

I checked out Dr White’s bio and readers may find this surprising and interesting.
he describes himself thusly:
“Starting in the late 1980’s, my ice core research has helped to show that large climate changes tend to occur in the natural system as abrupt and rapid shifts in mode probably driven by internal adjustments in the Earth climate system, rather than slow and gradual adjustments to changing external conditions, such as the amount of energy received from the sun. Shifts of more than 10˚C in mean temperature in less than a human lifetime are common in the paleoclimate record, and serve as a warning that adaptation to future climate changes may not be easy. My research in isotopes in the carbon cycle has also helped to show that land plants are capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, amounts that equal our input of CO2 from fossil fuel burning on short time scales. Such large changes in the uptake of CO2 by plants is a key piece in the puzzle we must solve to formulate workable policy on CO2 levels and climate change.”
That sounds pretty resonable actually.

……..”explores how to monitor climate change for warnings of abrupt changes and emerging impacts, and identifies high priority needs for future research directions and monitoring capabilities.”
Translation:
Explores how best to morph the useless monitoring of meaningless observations into climate trend warnings to promote the expansion of useless monitoring of meaningless observations.

My questions I emailed:
Re: Richard Alley linking climate change to the Arab Spring.
Food production appears to be increasing, and costs are falling. Please reconcile with your position on Arab Spring and climate.
US cost of food, as a % of income, has fallen from 20% to about 6%, from the 20s to today.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/09/americans-love-to-complain-about-rising-food-prices-here-are-three-reasons-you-should-stop-whining/
Global food production hs grown 41% faster (per capita) than the population.
http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/events/archive/2011/paa/david_lam.html
Re: the threat of massive retreat of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Antarctic sea ice extent is expanding. Would not this have to reverse before a collapse could occur?
Also, the IPCC has stated that there is no imminent danger of a WAIS collapse. Please reconcile your position with the IPCC.
However, the WAIS ice shelves are not immediately threatened by this mechanism, which would require a further warming of 10°C before the -5°C mean annual isotherm reached their ice fronts (Vaughan and Doake, 1996). Although atmospheric warming would increase the rate of deformation of the ice, causing the ice shelf to thin, response time-scales are of the order of several hundred years (Rommelaere and MacAyeal, 1997; Huybrechts and de Wolde, 1999).
Climate Change 2001
Working Group 1
11.5.4.3 Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets
According to IUCN data, the rates of extinction have been falling since the late 1800s.
Why does your statement that extinctions will increase, go against empirical data?
The IPCC states in the AR5 that they have low confidence in any abrupt change occurring.
Why do you dispute this?
Several components or phenomena in the climate system could potentially exhibit abrupt or nonlinear changes, and some are known to have done so in the past. Examples include the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon forest and monsoonal circulations. For some events, there is information on potential consequences, but in general there is low confidence and little consensus on the likelihood of such events over the 21st century. [12.5.5, Table 12.4]

On extinctions:
Extinction rates have been falling over the last 100 years, since the highest rates at the end of the 19th century. Apparently the UN agrees with Willis. Most extinctions are island species, with 68% of mammals, and 82% of bird extinctions. (page 58 and 59, chart in lower left corner)
https://archive.org/stream/worldatlasofbiod02groo#page/58/mode/2up/search/extinctions

The only thing I can think of that could shut down ocean circulation would be the Sun going out.
However there are a number of other abrupt changes that would have disastrous effects for the human species:
Very large scale volcanism (whether explosive or large scale fissure eruption/flood basalt)
A large asteroid or comet impact.
A flank collapse of a major oceanic island causing an ocean-wide tsunami
All of these are known to actually happen with a probability >10^-6 per year while the prophesied climate catastrophes can’t be demonstrated to have ever actually occurred.

So will the team members at IPCC Inc, be surprised by a sudden hardening of public hostility toward unnecessary spending of hard earned tax dollars, on useless junk like the UN and the associated parasites?
The damage the prophets or profits of climatology have done to science, is yet to play out.

Of course “abrupt” climate change is a threat. Look at the Pleistocene era, and the rule of thumb is just when things start looking stable they change again. The conceit is that everyone thinks that the climate ought to stay the way they remember it from the year they turned 18. It was a good year, but it’s not the law.