Climate ‘Tipping Points’ May Arrive Without Warning, Says Top Forecaster
From a UC Davis press release
A new University of California, Davis, study by a top ecological forecaster says it is harder than experts thought to predict when sudden shifts in Earth’s natural systems will occur — a worrisome finding for scientists trying to identify the tipping points that could push climate change into an irreparable global disaster.
“Many scientists are looking for the warning signs that herald sudden changes in natural systems, in hopes of forestalling those changes, or improving our preparations for them,” said UC Davis theoretical ecologist Alan Hastings. “Our new study found, unfortunately, that regime shifts with potentially large consequences can happen without warning — systems can ‘tip’ precipitously.
“This means that some effects of global climate change on ecosystems can be seen only once the effects are dramatic. By that point returning the system to a desirable state will be difficult, if not impossible.”
The current study focuses on models from ecology, but its findings may be applicable to other complex systems, especially ones involving human dynamics such as harvesting of fish stocks or financial markets.
Hastings, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, is one of the world’s top experts in using mathematical models (sets of equations) to understand natural systems. His current studies range from researching the dynamics of salmon and cod populations to modeling plant and animal species’ response to global climate change.
In 2006, Hastings received the Robert H. MacArthur Award, the highest honor given by the Ecological Society of America.
Hastings’ collaborator and co-author on the new study, Derin Wysham, was previously a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis and is now a research scientist in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the John Innes Center in Norwich, England.
Scientists widely agree that global climate change is already causing major environmental effects, such as changes in the frequency and intensity of precipitation, droughts, heat waves and wildfires; rising sea level; water shortages in arid regions; new and larger pest outbreaks afflicting crops and forests; and expanding ranges for tropical pathogens that cause human illness.
And they fear that worse is in store. As U.S. presidential science adviser John Holdren (not an author of the new UC Davis study) recently told a congressional committee: “Climate scientists worry about ‘tipping points’ … thresholds beyond which a small additional increase in average temperature or some associated climate variable results in major changes to the affected system.”
Among the tipping points Holdren listed were: the complete disappearance of Arctic sea ice in summer, leading to drastic changes in ocean circulation and climate patterns across the whole Northern Hemisphere; acceleration of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, driving rates of sea-level increase to 6 feet or more per century; and ocean acidification from carbon dioxide absorption, causing massive disruption in ocean food webs.
The new UC Davis study, “Regime shifts in ecological systems can occur with no warning,” was supported by the Advancing Theory in Biology program at the U.S. National Science Foundation and was published online today by the journal Ecology Letters, in its Early View feature: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123276879/abstract.
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FYI The image is by Anthony, and of course, it’s a spoof.
UC Davis is home of the Realclimate stalwart Jim Bouldin…
George E. Smith (08:52:10) :
Watched the same show. The conclusion I got from the iron find was not that the dust storms created the warming but that they were the result of a very fast warming. Maybe fifty years or less! Kinda fits into this topic, as that would seem to be a tipping point. The main guy was saying that this speed of warming had never been observed in the past records before.
But then if you think about it, if these dust storms are that large, able to cross the Atlantic, they would probably lead to some very fast cooling!
Just gets more interesting with every day.
The trailer –
Organised clime.
and of course to answer that burning question – does anyone on the team have a real life?
My tipping point prediction: the money spent and jobs lost due to this giant climate change hoax has reached a tipping point. When the two years of unemployment compensation checks quit arriving and 10% of the workforce is still unemployed and hungry, I predict a sea change in the gullibility of the public regarding climate change disaster predictions. Watch for it.
Can I have my title now? Tipping Point Forecaster is what I would prefer. ‘Ecological Forecaster’ has already been taken by some other charlatans.
A depth-charge mentality has suddenly gripped DC.
Rig for silent running.
Maybe the storm will think nobody’s home and stop dropping SnowMageddon cans of white stuff.
OMG it’s another blizzard. What’ll we do?
Play possum, stop plowing snow, fools ’em every time.
Somebody needs to tip that sign over.
What? Can’t tip it over because it is a piece of official government equipment?
Then what is it doing displaying that sort of message?
Ah, poor Chicago. Cold, blizzards. No Olympics. And now an earthquake nearby, 3.8 magnitude.
Dear President Obama, please have some concern for the town where you lived. Repent and turn away from the false AGW religion, before the fires and floods are sent as well.
Tipping point = unseen, unpredictable force of uncertain cause which appears without warning and causes damage of unknown magnitude = smiting.
I have conducted exhaustive search of 5000 years of historical records which show smiting decreases in frequency and magnitude over time and appears to have an inverse relationship with increases in technical knowledge. My work is opposed by such a O.Roberts, B.Graham, et al who claim I have wrongly attributed earthquakes and such to technical explanation when they are actually smiting data points. My conclusions are not yet final as smiting could well be cyclical in nature and simply at a current cyclical minimum unrelated to increases in technical knowledge. More study is required, though I believe that there has been a recent downward trend in quality of education levels, technical study in particular, and predictions of increased smiting or tipping points are a direct result.
My initial experiments involved cow tipping for which my father thrashed me thoroughly and which I now understand to be opposed on principal by PETA and others, so will have to consider carefully my scientific method.
“Scientists widely agree….” So what’s that mean? A few here and there ‘widely’ scattered throughout the world? Or does it mean ‘widely’ as in very broad and generally vague terms?
I’d guess he wants his phrasing to be interpreted as ‘consensus’ and there we are again with the same old paintbrush trying to cover weak science.
“tipping point” translation: ‘hysteresis hysteria’
The real weather you are experiencing is due, like Piers Corbyn says to Solar Weather Impact Periods though the sun’s activity it is not as high as former cycles the lower magnetic field on earth does not protect us as usually does.
Does anybody could supply more details?
But inadvertently is does. See, by just looking at population dynamics and sexual selection and that sort of thing, you are leaving out entirely: why does any species exist, in the sense of, what is its purpose? Now, the purpose of an ant colony? How about the purpose of the human race? How about the the meaning of life, as thought about by an individual? How about poetry, and awe, and wonder? See, that is our relationship to the world. It is like, we work because we want meaningful productive lives, but all you’re doing is measuring the paycheck and the carbon footprint. The ecologist’s analysis is flat, lifeless, dead. It’s just stuff eating and copulating. It’s no more holistic because it involves “living” entities than my bank account is holistic because it involves both receipts and debits.
By entirely ignoring why humanity lives, and desires, and dreams, whilst claiming that your field is “holistic”, you leave the door wide open for others to bring into the field their own dreams and ideals, their Gaia worship.
Sorry if that’s a bit of a leap, but please have a ponder. Ecology is not holistic. It is about systems. Material biological systems. But it has nothing about the meaning of life, about spiritual aspirations, about what makes humans special, in a sense. It has no Zen, no Dharma, no Way, no Spirit. Ecology is not holistic. It is a systems analysis.
Ecologists look at the material planetary systems and come to certain conclusions about population numbers and resources. They stick in their models numbers about human reproduction and land use and species extinction. But those models contain nothing about human dreams, progress, aspirations, poetry. They can’t be a guide for humanity when they ignore entirely what makes us human.
I was doing some philosophical thinking while out for my daily 20 mile bike ride yesterday.
“What”, I asked myself, “would motivate supposedly ‘objective’ people, trained in the ‘sciences’ to produce this continuous stream of ‘enviromental garbage’..”?
Then I remembered being at a dinner, in the mid 1990’s at the University of Minnesota, a dinner with the Dean of the Institute of Technology, Dean Enfant (that was his name, French background..)
The Dean lamented that the PEAK of the percentage of FEMALE engineering students occurred 15 years before, right around the time I graduated..(My Chemical Engineering class had 8 women among 45 men graduating)
He asked “WHY?” had the numbers gone down. He got a set of answers that really shocked him. The assembled, REAL, working engineers there told him – Engineers are PEONS. We generally have no real POWER over circumstances in our jobs. We are, in a word “EMASCULATED”.
The Dean then asked, what happened to the women? The answer was – They are very capable of communicating. Once they got into the “engineering workplace” they quickly advised their other women friends, “Don’t go into engineering, it’s a DEAD END..”
So the women transfered their interest and their efforts to MEDICAL SCHOOL and to DENTAL SCHOOL and to PHARMACY.
Now I began to think about a few of the “pure scientists” I’ve known. Guys who have STRUGGLED to maintain academic positions, positions in industry, and “employment” in general.
And I realized, you work your tail off to get your Phd by the time you are 30, you get into some position, somewhere… and then you find YOU HAVE NO POWER, INFLUENCE OR PRESTIGE, in all means of assesment.
THUS there is a MOTIVATION for these guys, in the “climate science” positions to SEEK attention and prestige and “power”, which they would not normally have in such positions.
Just when I thought I’d seen it all – Apparently we need to lower temps to 2C by 2017 (Assuming he meant by 2C) and half of the dry land will be flooded/water-covered by 2020. Wow!!!! Hope I have a beach house here in CO.
http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=548421&publicationSubCategoryId=75
wayne (01:17:06) : … What tipping points? Please give me a few examples of tipping points that have occured in the past …
The shifts from Winter to Summer and back every year are “tipping points.” Of course, we all consider them perfectly normal. What these guys are really panicking about aren’t “tipping points” per se, but rather the potential shifting of those points so that summers and winters become drier or wetter, hotter or cooler, longer or shorter and that these state changes last longer than a generation or so. AGW “theorists” – I say that tongue in cheek – are also worried about “runaway” warming – once the point shifts it continues to do so, which I believe means they are really worried that we’ll make the north pole look like Florida, real estate developers will head for Antarctica, and the Winter Olympics will no longer be differentiated from the Summer Olympics.
On a more serious note the only “tipping points” with dramatic global consequences that are known are major events in geological history such as the extinction that marked the end of the Cretaceous about 70 mya. The problem with those kinds of events is that while we can identify their consequences more or less, we do not know what really caused them. Temporal resolution in geological data is often problematic and while something may look “abrupt” geologically, it may actually have spanned centuries or millennia. Medieval Warm Periods and Little Ice Ages are not really dramatic in their consequences and would, after a period of adaptation, have little effect on our current society, were we to enter such a period.
Fashion in explaining such events changes with social fads – the lesson here being that although scientists may hope to appear detached and objective, they are mostly creatures of fashion. Currently many “scientists” are offering “explanations” based upon changes in atmospheric CO2, methane discharges, etc. One social reality is that while science and scientists are putatively about a search for knowledge, politicians and society in general tend to behave toward them as shamans with magical powers of perception and knowledge of the future. In short politicians and society “demand” science, yet will accept neither its limitations or uncertainties, which in turn means that “successful” scientists tend to either present as authoritarian dogmatists, or to be precisely that. This dynamic is evident in the CRU emails. Jones and Mann tend to be “dogmatists,” others are “faithful” yet concerned about the short comings of their science, e.g. Trenberth.
Somewhere in the dark
Some evil waits to kill you
Pay me to save you
Marlene Anderson (10:39:10) :
“Scientists widely agree….”
Simply: That’s a typo, it should be written: WILDLY AGREE ☺
How can Alan Hastings even consider tipping points on a global scale when I struggle with predicting my own tipping point when supping a favourite full bodied Cab Sauv.
@ur momisugly Paul Coppin:
> As someone whose meter goes on this “scheme” in the next billing cycle, I can tell you the above statement is plain hogwash. Time-cycle schemes are concocted by brain-dead people who have no idea what the necessary usage cycles are for most folks below 100k a year annual income, and appear to be concocted by people who believe that the wife stays home all day, or the nanny is available anytime of the day to do the laundry or nobody needs any sleep
It is basic economics that people (as in the large mass, average behavior, etc.) and business (not necessary each individual business, but industry and business as a whole) react and adapt to price incentives.
I don’t disagree that some (many? most?) people will have a harder time adapting than others. And I don’t disagree that some people may be less able to adapt, or may even suffer because they are unable to adapt.
I will even concede that there is a good argument, that as far as domestic users are concerned, that time-based price variations should be limited, so as to minimize the impact on those least able to adapt. But let’s at least be honest about what lack of time-based price variations are: a subsidy for those who would struggle to adapt.
The reason it is a subsidy, is that the actual the cost to supply each unit of power to when demand is low, is lower.
Tipping point has already occurred back in 1967.
Many actual physical evidence covered over with floss( smoke and mirrors) so as to keep the scientists from looking like idiots poking in the dark and keep the funding rolling in.
Econonic collapse would occur if it is known your factory or house would have a weather related event as who would be foolish enough to buy. Currency makes the world go around so don’t interfere say the politicians.
These convenient super snow storms will demand real explanations, taking into account all the serious events happening not attributable to the nonsense of AGW.
Waiting for that, here at the best science blog.
I would recommend that everyone take a look at the full, unadulterated, temperature data for both urban and rural areas, preferably relatively close to one another, and compare the temperature data. You can find this data here…
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
For example the Boerne monitoring station in Texas has monitored temperature data for over 100 years. From 1980-2000 it shows a 3 degree increase in temperature. However, if you look at the data as a whole and determine the standard deviation you will see that there is a +- 1.5 degree deviation that is pretty well constant and from the first to the last temperature reading there has been a 1 degree increase.
However, climatologists realize that a 1 degree increase over the course of 100 years is nothing to panic about while a 3 degree increase in the past 20 years is most definitely newsworthy…aren’t statistics fun.
How does one tell something that is the consequence of global climate change from local influence – such a deforestation?
How does one distinguish an event from being a tipping point from a unpredicted fluctuation?
If tipping points may arrive without warning, does this mean that the scientists haven’t a clue if and when they will arrive? That is, they are admitting that understanding climate change is beyond them.
This seems to be an “advance” on Lenton et al 2008 on Tipping Points to be found at http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786.full. There the authours lowered the barrier to include opinions, especially where they could influence the political climate.
Being a bit naive and dogmatic, I think science is about measurement, identification and classification. Any paper that increases the scope for opinion, dogma and bias is anti-science.
I think the real tipping point came a few months ago when the “climategate” story broke.