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.
“since life has been here the past 500+ million years seems to me such events have never happened.”
no, other than the End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic, and End Cretaceous, such events have never happened.
1. It says they admit they can’t predict anything
2 He is warning us there won’t be a warning. (Nonsense)
3 They can’t define what a tipping point is
4 Most recent pictures of tipping points I saw include roofs on metal buildings that exceeded the snow weight limit and crashed down. Fallen tree branches that were over loaded are examples of tipping point. Snow is not exactly an example of warming. It is an example of cooling. Too much moisture in the atmosphere, too much cold and therefore too much condensation and freezing and it falls out of the sky.
Snow and Ice are solid forms of both water and evidence of cooling.
Bob Tisdale (03:18:34) : Bob, I’m new to this blog game, but you seem to be the most readily accesible fellow who knows what he’s talking about! Would you please advise me on the following:
1. The main thrust of the climate change story seems to be based on ATMOSPHERIC “anomolies”; so why do NASA GISS, UAH, HADCRUT, RSS all include SST into the equations. Surely, the temperatures of these very different elements should be seperately monitored and compared, not homogenised?
2. I have always believed that the oceans are the greatest force on Earth that can effect weather, climate change, coastal glaciers, sea ice growth and decline, hurricans, etc. Is this correct?
3. The historic plots that I have seen of Ice Age/Interglacial periods to my mind indicate that, although the time spent in each phase is measured in millenia, the time to change back to an Ice Age is very short, perhaps measured in decades. This idea essentially fits in with the findings of the subject report in this blog. Is this feasible?
Look forward to your reply (hopefully), Yours Aye Bob
“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.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that the harvesting of fish stocks remains an ecological problem, despite being grouped with other complex systems like financial markets. There is a word for an article like this. The word is tosh.
“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.”
Really? What rising sea level? I live on a bay, and the water hasn’t risen in my entire lifetime. Do the people who make these claims ever go to the places they say are being inundated, dried up, burned out, or plagued? Do they have any historical perspective? Do they know anything about communicable disease statistics?
The truth they ignore is that in most Western countries, especially in cities, air-quality is far better than it was a hundred years ago when people burned coal, peat, and wood for heating and cooking, and when forest fires were common and impossible to combat. People are healthier now than ever before in history. Human and pet lifespans have increased, not decreased. Insect-borne diseases have been nearly eradicated. Life is much easier. And we owe a lot of this to fossil fuels and coal-burning energy plants. Look what air-conditioning did for Florida.
So what are the doomsayers practical alternatives? They don’t offer any. Electric cars? Where do they think the electricity comes from? Oh, those coal-burning electric plants. Oops. Wind mills? How are those working out, and does it matter that countless endangered birds are being slaughtered by them? Solar energy? Can it run a single commercial air-conditioning system let along an entire city?
The authors of this new article clearly have been reading IPCC reports and WWF propaganda. I bet the publishers rushed it into print, hoping to beat the tipping point of revelations discrediting most, if not all, of it.
*sigh*
As a software engineer, I remember this stuff from the ’90s. Emergence, complexity, A-Life, genetic algorithms. Those were heady days that seemed so full of promise. Nothing became of any of it.
These days, I have to give Dr. Hastings credit for even managing to get funding for that kind of stuff.
They cannot predict them, but we need to tax CO2 and wreck economies and kill millions of people in the process.
I would suggest that they have no idea what they are talking about and should be ignored.
Paul Daniel Ash,
Were any of the great events you listed
1- rapid?
2- caused by CO2 in the atmosphere?
If this report were more honest, it would cite “The Day After Tommorrow” seventeen times in the endnotes.
Is climate tipping anything like cow tipping? Does it help to drink lots of beer before you go out and tip the climate?
Willis, personally I’m a climate fatalist. The tipping point is coming like a thief in the night. Can’t say when and cant guess its direction. Best of all there is nothing you can do about it. So, party like its 1999.
It’s funny on the other side of alarmism is fatalism.
@Bob (Sceptical Redcoat)
“Surely, the temperatures of these very different elements should be seperately monitored and compared, not homogenised?”
The identifying hallmark process of climate science is to reprocess, homogenise and forecast. You might argue (and I could not possibly comment) that averaging the temperatures of different elements or materials with very different energy contents and specific heats might possibly be a tad misleading … but of course they don’t actually do that, they measure temperature anomalies which are entirely different!
“Theoretical ecologist?”
It’s worse than we thought.
This just in:
1. A massive proliferation in rain forest tree growth has been discovered.
2. Oxygen upticks in the atmosphere are increasing life spans, this abundance of oxygen may be linked to extensive plankton, algae and plant growth.
3. Huge surpluses of food have flooded the global market, driving down prices and confusing the third world with abundant grain stores and food profits.
4. Home gardening has exploded around the nation as, for some unknown reason, plants have become extremely easy to grow and very hard for the novice to kill.
5. General goodwill among men seems to be increasing at a horrifying rate. Lifespans increase while living standards increase, turning people to more noble pursuits and decreasing procreation rates. World population is SHRINKING due to increased oxygen and food stores. People are relaxing…
Off topic, but hilarious, is this quip about Sarah Palin and climate from the Joy Behar show on Feb 8.
Newsbusters
Earthquakes and tsunamis are caused by global warming. Hrm…
What does the tipping point for an ice age look like?
John “that averaging the temperatures of different elements or materials with very different energy contents and specific heats might possibly be a tad misleading …”
And of course there is no real meaning to “average” in temperature, because it is not a strict unit in the way others like mass, length are. E.g. if you are considering the “average” temperature of a blackbody emitter of radiation, the appropriate way to average the “blackbody temperature” is to average the radiation emission which is T^4.
So, obviously a scientists looking at the average “temperature” when considering radiation like e.g. …. the earth …. would abviously average the T1^4 + T2^4 etc. because this gives you the temperature of an “average” blackbody of the same surface area.
But … that obviously requires a better calculator, than you need to apply for the average climate research grant.
Hum it’s Chaos with a dash of Reality Unwoven!
Ref – hunter (08:13:42) :
“They cannot predict them, but we need to tax CO2 and wreck economies and kill millions of people in the process.
I would suggest that they have no idea what they are talking about and should be ignored.”
_________________
But that’s precisely the point, they do know what they’re talking about and they so hope that you ignore them. Their goals are exactly as you have stated them, well almost, you were very very conservative in your “kill millions of people in the process” remark. Actually, they want to kill billions but won’t admit to that in public for fear that they will be misunderstood. 😉
Presumably the Arctic Ocean has currents moving under the ice year-round. Maybe velocity and direction would change if the ice melted every summer, but this just seems like another canard to me.
Acidification of oceans due to great influx of CO2? Surely there are studies available in the geological literature comparing shellfish viability with higher CO2 concentration. From my recollection, no evidence for any significant stress on organisms due to acidic water in the open ocean has ever been found since the Cambrian.
Stress from extremes of salinity in embayments is common (both high and low) in the fossil record. Lakes often are subject to high acidity (sometimes natural) which affects life forms and is an evolutionary forcing agent.
Wait, wait: THEY were fatally wounded with “Climate Gate”, now they are trying to overcome that real “tipping point” by crying Climate Change, Climate Change! and blame all the snow fallen and to be falled down to it, then, inmediately after that, they will cry: We have to act inmediately!, then your EPA will enforce hard measures to “try to prevent futher catastrophes” and you will be really done.
The trouble for the healthy and sane rest of the world is that everywere politicians will imitate your politicians, but with the big difference that we, happy inhabitants of the third world, don’t use to fulfill any law we don’t like it or find it bothersome or too complicated to obey, so our life will continue as usual while you will sacrifice for all your holy sainthood, from Al “Baby” to ‘Death trains” Hansen.
Well it seems that Public Television stations (US) have embarked on a continuous stream of climate disaster programs disguised as science interest programs.
Last night I watched a program about “Extreme Cave Diving”; now what could be sinister about that ? Seems like these idiots went scuba diving in “Blue Holes” in the Bahamas. Now in my view, anyone who goes swimming in water that has land above it, instead of atmosphere, is by definition an idiot. These folks were doubly drunk in that the dived using “rebreather” apparatus. Prior to the dive, one of the ladies gave a detailed technical description of why “rebreather” apparatus usage, is like putting agun to your head, and pulling the trigger to see how reliable the mechanism is. The equipment takes CO2 out of whatever is in the can, and feeds you whatever is left that you just keep inhaling; sometimes some of it is oxygen; and then sometimes it isn’t. She described how many of her friends she has buried after their most recent rebreather equipped dive.
So into this hole under the Bahamas they go, and follow a string underneath a crumbling roof. They can tell that they are going the right direction, by observing the string of decaying scuba diver bodies strewn along the way; who evidently ran out of what ever it was they thought they were breathing.
So the aim of this dive was to find crocodiles that don’t exist in the Bahamas; well at least above in the sane part of it.
They did find a thin layer of Red soil embedded in the walls. They were actually looking for that, since they had smashed some stalagmites, and sectioned them, and found traces of iron there; and iron is one of the other things that doesn’t exist in the Bahamas.
So this red earth layer, turns out to be iron ore, that actually is dust or sand that blows out of the sahara in Africa in big dust storms. Evidently so big that the storm that made this layer in the Bahamas, evidently tripped a tipping point and sent the climate into a tizzy, so that sea level rose 20 metres. And all this took place in about 50 years, some 10,000 years ago, if I remember correctly.
So if you find some red dust on your windshield, time to batten down the hatches, and watch the sea rise.
There was another sho on at the same time, all about the smart electric meter that is going to charge me for gas and electricity, according to when I use it. They just installed this wonderful gadget last week, and told me how much money it was going to make ; excuse me, that is save.
Note they did not include a schedule of rates versus daily/weekly hours, so I know what times to throw the main breaker, snd shut down poer to my house.
It’s just a scam dreamed up by some software tinkerer; who convinced PG&E that they could make lots of money by figuring out when people liked to use their power, and jacking up the price during those hours; meanwhile these overactive computer nerds, could sell lots of hardware to the power company.
The whole evening on all the local PBS stations was just oozing with green propaganda, aimed at the kids to scare the hell out of them. They didn’t say how many tonnes of toxic chemicals were involved in the manufacture of a tonne of silicon for the free green clean renewable energy. Some poor farmer was conned in to letting them install a wind turbine on his farm, so they kept moving it around, and digging up the whole place to run cables to try and connect this piece of crap to the power grid, which for somereason doesn’t come close to his open farmland.
Yes we have tipping points ahead; such as when they get to declaring all of these folks to be criminally insane.
Well the reason I was watching PBS, is that they are about the only stations that my rabbit ears pickup; that actually speak English. There is another station that I can get the WWE wrestling on and the extreme fights; but they weren’t on last night. No I’m not going to pay for cable or satellite or any other 500 stations of shop-at-home; don’t have a cell phone or blackberry or raspberry either; and I’m not going to read books on line, or any other screen; I’ll stick with the dead tree books; that’s my idea of carbon sequestration.
What about the tipping for going back to ice age temperature the Earth as seen more often then not in the last 500,000 years?
We could also get wiped out by a giant asteroid.
To: Michael (00:30:49) :
“I’m trying to find the scene where the British horses were going to trample the people and the people laid down on the ground. The horses knew instinctively and spiritually not to trample people. ”
You’re kidding, right? Right? Horses don’t have a spiritual connection with people.. they just don’t like to step on things they don’t understand. They don’t walk over cattle guards, either. I was thrown from a horse because she refused to step in a very small trickle of water. It wasn’t because she was spiritually connected to the oneness of the water… she was just dumb.
You lay down in front of the horses, we’ll watch. 🙂
Joanie
Here’s the shock. They are admitting they just don’t know. Congratulations guys! That is the first step!