A survey of climate scientists reveals uncertainty in their predictions of changes to the global climate, yet finds that they believe there is a real chance of passing a “tipping point” that could result in large socio-economic impacts in the next two centuries. The expert elicitation was conducted between October 2005 and April 2006 with a computer-based interactive questionnaire completed individually by participants. A total of 52 experts participated in the elicitation (see Table S2 in the PDF below for names and affiliations). The questionnaire included 7 events of crossing a tipping point. Elmar Kriegler and colleagues asked the climate experts to estimate the likelihood of impacts to components of the climate system under different warming scenarios.
The five systems discussed in the paper concerned major changes in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and El Niño. The probabilities given by the experts varied widely, but on average, they assigned significant chances to a tipping point in this or the next century for at least the medium to high warming scenarios.
Using the experts’ more conservative estimates, the authors calculate a 1 in 6 chance that a tipping event will occur if the temperature increase in the next 200 years is between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius. For a higher temperature increase, the probability was just over 1 in 2. According to the authors, the results suggest that the large uncertainties that come with climate predictions do not imply low probability that catastrophic events will occur.
Since the survey was conducted in 2005 and 2006, I wonder if the opinions are equivalent today. They might have gotten more bang for their buck if they’d used a survey company like Gallup. I’m sure the results would be faster.
The paper is titled: Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system
Elmar Kriegler, Jim W. Hall, Hermann Held, Richard Dawson, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, PO Box 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, Germany; Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890; School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 7RU, United Kingdom;
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, United Kingdom; and eEnvironmental Change Institute, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom
Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved February 2, 2009 (received for review September 16, 2008)
Here is their diagram of the tipping possibilities in the global climate system:
Here is the PNAS abstract
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Ryan
That is a very good paper by Christopher Monkton. Refreshingly clear and apparently free of dogma. Why are views such as this not getting the airspace they deserve in this lopsided debate? Don’t say he works for Exxon?
Anthony,
While I like your article on “tipping points”, I must point out to you that your picture is completely in accurate. While most here are thinking of “tipping” as in “give a tip to your waitress”, this sign has nothing to do with that. The EPA law is about “fly-tipping” which was indeed enacted in 1990, and is illegal for a very good reason.
Fly-Tipping is:
Please see:
Fly Tipping
Penalties for Fly-Tipping
Fly-Tipping and the Law
The picture of your sign pertains to the dumping of trash and NOT tipping your waitress!
Additionally, the EPA Act 1990.
Environmental Protection Act 1990
You really should change the caption on that picture, it gives a very false impression.
Squidly,
Relax…
Anthony knows this already.
It’s meant to be humour.
Everyone in this forum knows this is not about tipping waitresses, or cab drivers.
If we did, we would all be rooting for Hansen, Gore and the rest of the global warming madness.
Squidly,
I scanned over the EPA document.
Another glittering masterpiece of Soviet-like bureaucracy.
Burn it!
Squidly,
I take that back,
scanning the comments I guess there are a couple of narrowly-horizoned dimbulbs here who were mislead.
From “The Free Dictionary” by Farlex
Acronym Definition
MGIS Musa Germplasm Information System
CMOC civil-military operations center (US DoD)
CMOC Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center
CMOC Certified Manager of Condominiums (Real Estate Institute of Canada accreditation)
CMOC Canadian Mustang Owners Club
CMOC Chi Mei Optoelectronics (Corporation)
CMOC Civil-Military Object Class
CMOC Civil-Military Operation Cell
CMOC Catastrophic Medical Operations Center
CMOC Caspi Meruerty Operating Co. BV (Kazakhstan)
AMAZ no definition but judging from the position on the map I think its short for AMAZON
DAIS Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
DAIS Disability Access Information and Support
DAIS Diabetes Atherosclerosis Intervention Study
DAIS Department for Administrative and Information Services (Australia)
DAIS Data Access and Integration Services
DAIS Domestic Abuse Intervention Services
DAIS Digital Airborne Imaging Spectrometer
DAIS Database and Information Systems (Urbana, Illinois)
DAIS Danish Artificial Intelligence Society
DAIS Dirección de Aplicación de Imágenes Satelitarias (Spanish)
DAIS Distributed Application Integration System
DAIS Distributed Automatic Intercept System
DAIS Data Acquisition for Industrial Systems (energy industry standard supported by ABB, Alstom, and IBM)
DAIS Digital Avionics Information System
DAIS Dhirubhai Ambani International School (Mumbai)
DAIS Data Avionics Information System (NASA)
DAIS Digital Avionics Instruction Set
DAIS Department of Administration and Interdisciplinary Studies
DAIS Design and Analysis of Information Systems
DAIS Database Access Integration Services
DAIS Dental Alternatives Insurance Services, Inc
DAIS Defense Automatic Integrated Switching
DAIS DECCO Accounting Information System
DAIS Design and Internet Strategies (Queensland, Australia)
DAIS Dealer and Agency Interface System (Australia)
DAIS Deloitte Australia Intranet Site
DAIS Data Archive and Interchange Standards
DAIS Dark Age Infantry Slog (gaming)
DAIS Data Adapter Interface Software
DAIS Davison Automatic Injection System
DAIS Diagenics Allergy Information Services, Ltd (UK)
DAIS Data Administration and Integration Solutions
NINO National Insurance Number (UK)
NINO Nine in Nine Out (babywearing organization)
NINO Nothing In Nothing Out
NINO Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten
We have the meaning of the acronyms, suddenly it all makes sense IE from the Musa Germplasm Information System (MGIS) a sea level rise takes us to Data Adapter Injection system (DAIS), or Deloitte Australia Intranet Site. (DAIS)
In fact there are hundreds of tipping points available and all of them make more sense than the 52 experts in the original survey.
Over to you for the most hilarious.
I have serious problem with all theses climate experts who constantly preach only doom and gloom for mankind and the climate of this planet. They seem to be unable to get right neither the first few years nor the first decade in predicting realistic actual global temperatures. Now we are being asked to accept climate forecasts 100 years, 200 years and even a 1000 year ahead and some with even 90% confidence. It seems to me that climate science is the only free money science going around town today and if you want some of the action you have invent a potential threat whether real or imaginary, exaggerate it and then sell it to get the your share of the free money.
We just heard from 2009 International Conference on Climate Change attended by some 800 scientists and there was no such tipping point message coming from this conference. Matter of fact it was the opposite message .Natural variability is what drives our climate. We have no control over this.
There are just too many so called experts who now totally confuse the public. Thank goodness that the public is not buying this as 44% of them now believe that long term planetary trends are responsible for the climate change. The governments remain gullible and give our hard earned tax money away too easily while people are forced to live in tents with no jobs and no money others are chasing nebulous and expensive climate studies 1000 years ahead. What waste. We need to deal with our today’s problems first.
Let’s focus on legitimate goals like cleaning up real air pollution like SO2, NOx, CO, particulate matter, ground level ozone and smog, volatile organic compounds, lead. Let’s improve our energy efficiency and develop cleaner fuels but let’s stop focusing on CO2 only. It will do very little to change climate.Instead of preparing for unprecedented global warming for the next 30 years we better prepare for global cooling and quickly for the cooling has already started.
Brendan wrote (15:26:56) :
“… I’d say that the old axiom rings true…
There are lies.
Damn lies.
And statistics.
Actually, that’s from a quote popularized by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain):
http://www.bartleby.com/66/99/16799.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.”
I use it all the time.
Richard
A waggish friend used to argue that warm temperatures were caused by increasing numbers of people. Witness the equatorial lattitudes, where the population far exceeds that of colder climes. Or, as Hotrod points out, look what happens when people gather in a room—it heats up so much that people take their coats off!
/Mr Lynn
“Using the experts’ more conservative estimates, the authors calculate a 1 in 6 chance that a tipping event will occur if the temperature increase in the next 200 years is between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius.”
What a joke. This is one of the worst examples of faux-science that I have read since the Summary for Policy-Makers of the IPCC report. Exactly how was this 1 in 6 chance “calculated”? Lets say I follow college basketball (I don’t, really) and am asked by a freind what I think the odds are that Kansas repeats in this year’s tournament. I say 60%. How is this procedure mathematical, and how is it scientific?
My guess is the odds are 50/50. It either happens or it don’t.
OT, this just in, hot off the teletype, whatever, but Gentleman James is at it again.
Controversial NASA Scientist to Lead Climate March in Britain
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,509407,00.html
Here’s one tipping point worthy of note, that of of Climate Realism. This is truly something for the Alarmists to be alarmed about.
The lowest sustained solar radio flux since the F10.7 proxy was created in 1947;
Solar wind is the lowest observed since the beginning of the space age;
The solar wind magnetic field 36 percent weaker than during the minimum of Solar Cycle 23;
Effectively no sunspots;
Cosmic rays at near record-high levels (is this a fact?).
I think Leif’s theory Climate = no sun effect is falling apart
Mind you… could be completely wrong.. I admire his tenacity though…
re previous message some supporting evidence = http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.3.16.2009.gif
RE previous: It seems the cosmic ray story is correct as well
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
We are reaching a tipping point, though.
Ever since the education establishment began demolishing the safety net of moral teaching (beginning around the 1920’s, with the ejection of teaching the Constitution from schools), we have engineered a generation which is almost, but not entirely devoid of the concepts of self-rule and capitalism. Thus our “march to socialism”, which stems from the fact that so many feel that “soaking the rich” will improve the lot of the underclass, somehow. (See: This faux outrage against the AIG execs who got bonuses, and now Congress wants to pass ex post facto tax law to target this supposed inequity.) This AGW scare is a part of the attempt by some to aggrandize power over all of us by making the underclass dependent upon them to provide for all our needs and wants.
This may seem off-topic to many, but it is the topic. The AGW gang are a part of this attempt to get control of commerce through carbon-taxation (ergo, Cap and Trade [1]). Beware, these people will gain that control, and things will become increasingly expensive. Staple foods will become more rare and costly, and there will be strife and trouble. All because so many feel sure that these “experts” must know what they’re talking about.
That is the purpose of presenting consensus in lieu of science.
Richard
[1] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/01/capandtrade101.html
All of this predicting and calculating and scaring is based on the silly assumption that we can even measure the Earth’s “average” temperature and that this “average” has a meaning. It does however give us something to do all day.
Amazing accomplishment, raising the appeal to authority to a science while establishing the notion of a local consensus as scientific fact . . . Gore’s method on a nuclear scale. This will make science a whole lot easier.
My gawd! I never correlated the phrase “tipping point” with more funding! What a calculated and cleaver use of words. This goes back to the conflagration of like-minded green scientists who wished to somehow bring about a green utopia and freedom from foreign oil. With benevolent thoughts they conjured up meaningless…um..er…meaningful, emotional phrases that would not only cause bucket tipping but would bring the group to popular fame and increased publication. Which would then lead to new more leisurely pursuits in scientific inquiry: polls!
The grant application would go something like this and hand written on college ruled paper, double spaced:
Me: “I would like to study this ‘opinion’ phenomenon, as this is an important part of global warming.”
Grant committee: “$500,000.”
Me: “This study is also relevant to the Arctic ice issue.”
Grant committee: “plus $100,000.”
Me: “I also think it will lead to the discovery of the ‘hot spot’.”
Grant committee: “1 mil”.
Me: “Thank you for your time. Can I poll you now? Just talk into this rabbit hutch while I read the temperature gauge.”
anna v (21:19:00) :
Ever since the ice core data forced me to look in the face the true prophecy: “an ice age is coming in a century next to you”, I have been thinking of how to stop it.
So had Hansen. There is a link somewhere in this blog where it shows he said that we can prevent the next ice age by emitting excess greenhouse gases. Well this ability goes down the drain, because the rising CO2 has not managed to stop the cooling
PDO .
In an article in Scientific American (March ’05), William Ruddiman hypothesized that man, through his agricultural practices beginning some 8,000 years ago actually did prevent an ice age, due to occur some 5,000 years ago from occurring. That, combined with the modern warming supposedly caused by industrialization has meant that the climate today, without man’s influence would be 1.5 – 2C cooler, meaning parts of northeastern Canada could be ice covered.
This is also what Flannery proposed in his book The Weather Makers.
It’s a Mann-tastic idea, of course, putting us today at the lower end of a scary-looking hockey stick. He does posit that once fossil fuels are depleted, some 200 years from now, that temperatures will decline once more.
The only truth to the idea is that the warming we have experienced has been a boon to mankind, whereas cooling would have been deadly.
I think we are approaching a tipping point, but it’s political and unrelated to the actual climate.
Will the USA implement an ill-conceived cap-and-trade system to fund new social programs? Will we implement a less onerous and more transparent carbon tax instead? Will people press our political leaders to do nothing that will drag the economy further? Will the skeptics and realists finally be heard, or will they continue to be dismissed as flatearthers?
That’s the real tipping point we’re approaching and it’s coming up fast.
[snip- traffic troll]
Pamela, maybe get some of that funding to the 5th grader you spoke of in another thread. Perhaps he will be able to forecast the weather here more accurately than has been done up to now. If it is so “easy”, than how come nobody can do it? I was surprised as it was the least intelligent and most mean spirited post I have ever seen from you. If you would be so kind as to explain why you felt it necessary to disrespect me in such a manner? Are you still upset that I dare to question Dr. Svalgaard? You have to admit there is little humility and much contempt for most of us in his posts, yet the fact remains that he might just be wrong. This possibility exists for all of us, pro or non, sun as driver or not. I have truly enjoyed reading your posts as they are well grounded and well thought out. Until that one. Were you having a bad day? WUWT?
Seems that key Labour supporters in Australia who will be hit hardest by an Emissions Trading Scheme don’t like the idea.