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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
hotrod wrote:
“In that case, no one of them contributes more than 10% of the total necessary negative feedback to put a hard limit on either excursion. You don’t necessarily need to find the driver, you may in fact be looking for a team of drivers each of which is insignificant by themselves.”
Yes….a TEAM of DRIVERS. Very insightful explanation and observation. Enjoyed your post.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
tallbloke (00:31:26) : I think there is the danger of falling into the same mindset as the warmista here.
Oh dear, now I’m going to have to be all serious again 8-{
Didn’t I read somewhere that a single hurricane develops as much power as the entire U.S. annual consumption of energy? Or something along those lines.
Well, my personal favorite is that a 100 mile by 100 mile square of the Mohave desert would, with presently available solar thermal technology, provide all the electricity used by the entire U.S.A. (which implies much more than that arrives in the sunshine since we have significant losses in conversion to electricity…)
Kinda puts it in perspective…
Similarly, about a 100 x 100 mile square of ocean waves could provide roughly the same power. And there are other similar examples…
If we entertain ideas of being able to tweak the thermostat, it gives creedence to a false notion of potential human influence.
Well, at the risk of being afflicted with hubris, there is a great difference between an engineered highly leveraged solution and a thesis that such a result happened by accident when no such physics can be demonstrated… There can be human influence, the question is can there be enough…
See my prior (somewhat humor oriented) post for potential examples. We have already excavated a canal across Panama. Yes, the ice age prevention channel would need to be orders of magnitude wider and deeper. Then again we would not be using puny 1900 steam shovels… And if it really were an imminent ice age, nuclear excavation just might be acceptable. That’s all a lot more likely to have a real impact than cow farts…
Similarly there is a world of difference between an accidental deposit of a trace of soot and the deliberate engineered creation of kilotons of it all deposited in exactly the most effective places.
Heck, I just thought of another one that might work! There is an area of below sea level in Egypt. A tunnel to the sea makes a giant salt evaporator. Ship that salt to the N. Pole and you get a “2 fer” with enhanced ice melt AND extra salinity accelerating the thermohaline circulation.
Given that ice ages have a gradual onset (compared to human lifetimes) over thousands of years, we would only need to enhance the warming effect a small percentage per year to hold it off… It might take several highly leveraged, directed, engineered actions to do it: but I think it would be possible (since the physics of these actions is fairly well understood, unlike CO2 impacts, but someone would need to ‘run the numbers’ to be sure.)
There are, after all, a few orders of magnitude difference between “ice gone in 5 years” and “ice slowed a small percent each year for 10,000 years”.
I anticipate that once carbon tax is in place, it will be defended no matter
Yup. Just like the “emergency only” U.S. income tax that is still with us… There is no such thing as a temporary tax. (See several state sales taxes for further examples. Such as the California rise from 4% to 5% IIRC only about a double ago…) I’m afraid that taxes only rise until the society collapses. Have I mentioned lately that Economics is called the Dismal Science for a reason?…
George E. Smith (09:15:00) : See where I said; “given that the orbital parameters stay pretty much what they now are. ” OK; you have to read what I say; not what you thought I said.
Sorry. I took that to mean “Given that the orbital variations in ellipticity , inclination et.al. and polar obliquity precession et.al. stay pretty much varying as they do now” rather than as you have clarified “If we froze the earth orbital ellipticity, inclination et.al. and the polar obliquity, precession et.al. at present values”. My mistake. I presumed you would not be postulating the impossible, when in fact you were postulating a hypothetical world.
AKD (10:39:27) :
They correlate far better to the SSTs right above them than to the lack of human visitation. 😉
Is there any indication if the ‘bleaching hot spots’ are observed events or if they are computed fantasies? (i.e. is it the computed SST when above a hypothetical limit temp for corals?) I’ve learned that you have to ask for every bit of data if it is real, computed, interpolated, invented, projected, homogenized, fantasized, …
No tipping – especially raries
Because we all known that it has always been
a long long way to tip a rary
Reply: Duuude ~ charles the moderator.
No No.. Tipping point = The point at which no one believes your theory anymore.
Steven Goddard (15:20:39) :
Within 50 years we will have all kinds of new technologies which will remove fears about CO2, and give people who like to worry something completely different to worry about.
Hehe.. I give it 5 years before the screaming becomes Ice age! Ice age! The only tipping point I have seen is a change from warm to cool but the beauty of it all is… just about the time it gets on a roll.. the climate will change again .. hahahah!
E.M. Smith and Anna V.
Wanted you to know that my “mental ears” perk up when I encounter a comment from either of you and have enjoyed following your exchanges concerning the oncoming ice glacial period. I gather that recent paleoclimatology findings suggest that the onset of a glacial period can behin within as short a period as a few decades, as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of years previously thought. My recemt reading suggests that there is no useful way for estimating when the next glaciation will begin since there a recent study has found ony about a 20% agreement between the earth’s orientation to the sun and the start of glaciation. I think that the longest interglacial (four periods back) was about 20,000, but most are in the range of 10,000 to 15,000 years. And it appears that the glacial periods have been getting longer, but the interglacoa; periods have not, which is kind of interesting.
Despite the clever ideas that the two of you have come up with, my own notion is to keep an ear cocked for unusual weather events that migh possibly be related to the coming glaciation. Such as the recent Siberia-like cold in parts of Canada and the northern US, and the third of a mile advance of the Alaska glaziers in Glazier Bay — the first advance in 250 years.
And finally, I want to extend a point E.M Smith made in an earlier post and which has a direct bearing on the topic. There really is a real and important “tipping point” relative to change in the level of CO2. If it drops below the range of 150 to 200 ppm C3 plants will begin to suffer from carbon starvation.This is not a speculative issue, since evidence for this occuring during the last glacial period has been retreived from tree specimens retreived from the La Brea Tar Pits. Paleoclimatologists have also speculated that low levels of CO2 occuring during glacial periods might have been responsible for the transformation of forrests to savanas that were critical to human evolution.
Please don’t request links, since I do not have the means for providing them. I am 83 and do not have the know-how for keeping track of the articles that I read in Googling.
Pamela, your need to put me down to feel better about yourself does not look good on you. Neither climate nor weather can be predicted using 5th grade science books. Or 12th grade science books. This is what makes the phrase “Climate Change” so ridiculous. Your generalizations are also unbecoming. Calgary’s weather is chaotic in the extreme (as other posters have mentioned), and it seems it has become even more difficult to forecast of late. I was doing UHI studies with my father 36 years ago (about grade 5, coincidentally), so I do not appreciate your condescension, thank you. Perhaps you thought my question was simplistic, but I think it is you who missed the point. My father has a Doctor of Science in climatology, I do not, but it is possible that I may have picked up a little more than 5th grade science growing up.
OT: Anthony, our California tax dollars at work:
source:
http://www.pacinst.org/reports/sea_level_rise/report.pdf
THE IMPACTS OF SEA-LEVEL RISE ON THE CALIFORNIA COAST
DRAFT PAPER
A Paper From:
California Climate Change Center
Prepared By:
Matthew Heberger, Heather Cooley, Pablo Herrera, Peter H. Gleick, and Eli Moore of the Pacific InstituteAQMD.
Quoting from the Abstract: ” Over the past century, sea level has risen nearly eight inches along the California coast, and general circulation model scenarios suggest very substantial increases in sea level as a significant impact of climate change over the coming century. This study includes a detailed analysis of the current population, infrastructure, and property at risk from projected sea‐level rise if no actions are taken to protect the coast. The sea‐level rise scenario was developed by the State of California from medium to high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but does not reflect the worst‐case sea‐level rise that could occur. We also evaluate the cost of building structural measures to reduce that risk. If development continues in the areas at risk, all of these estimates will rise. No matter what policies are implemented in the future, sea‐level rise will inevitably change the character of the California coast.
We estimate that a 1.4 meter sea‐level rise will put 480,000 people at risk of a 100‐year flood event, given today’s population. Among those affected are large numbers of low‐income people and communities of color, which are especially vulnerable. A wide range of critical infrastructure, such as roads, hospitals, schools, emergency facilities, wastewater treatment plants, power plants, and more will also be at increased risk of inundation, as are vast areas of wetlands and other natural ecosystems. In addition, the cost of replacing property at risk of coastal flooding under this sea‐level rise scenario is estimated to be nearly $100 billion (in year 2000 dollars). A number of structural and non‐structural policies and actions could be implemented to reduce these risks. For example, we estimate that protecting some vulnerable areas from flooding by building seawalls and levees will cost at least $14 billion (in year 2000 dollars), with added maintenance costs of another $1.4 billion per year. Continued development in vulnerable areas will put additional areas at risk and raise protection costs.”
Roger Sowell> “THE IMPACTS OF SEA-LEVEL RISE ON THE CALIFORNIA COAST
”
Some one is watching the half filled glass, not the half empty one. If something is rising up something is sinking down…with every quake. (VBH: Very black humor)
Adolfo Giurfa,
Earthquakes here tend to move sideways, not up and down so much.
We have many more problems from ground subsidence due to oil and gas extraction, and some from water wells.
see these two links, both for Long Beach, California.
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ozsvath/images/long_beach_subsidence.htm
http://www.uwsp.edu/geO/faculty/ozsvath/lectures/Deep%20Subsidence.htm
David Ball
I notice your comment about Pamela and took the trouble to go all through this thread, as being mean spirited would be very uncharacteristic of the posts I have seen from her.
All I can see is a parody she made and a mild comment. Unless something has been deleted I honestly can’t see anything that would upset you so much.
I think it was just a misunderstanding.
Tonyb
TonyB: After checking back to Pam’s remark, I agree with your comment to David.
You have to go to the thread regarding Al Gore’s Writing on the wall. There is no misunderstanding. I do not care if I am popular on this blog, it seems I am not, but If you read back further I will be vindicated. I had a legitimate question, which Anthony did not answer in his response, by the way.You must admit that to imply that a 5th grader can predict weather is an unintelligent remark and was clearly meant to mock. For what reason she would decide to mock me is beyond my knowledge, and you will read in that thread my question as to why she felt the need to do this. I do not attack anyone on this sight, I do not engage in ad homs. I guess I do not fit into her little “community” on this blog. I thought we were on the same side. A house divided cannot stand said the man in the stove-pipe hat.