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.
??”Climate ‘Tipping Points’ May Arrive Without Warning, Says Top Forecaster”??
I think it reads better as:
Climate ‘Tipping Points’ May Arrive Without Warming, Says Top Forecaster
A nice asteroid can also strike with little or no warning. Now there’s a tipping point.
So if you can’t predict it , why the worry? And why this assumption about warming? The one certainty we have about global climate change is that in about 3,000 years there will be another ice age. And it won’t be a mini.
Steve McIntyre needs to let Joy Behar explain global warming
ENSLER: Well, I just think the idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming is bizarre.
BEHAR: Every scientist at every note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in it.
ENSLER: And I think we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis.
Every one knows all scientists believe earthquakes and tsunamis come from warming. Joy Behar can publish the next IPCC report.
http://www.peekinthewell.net/blog/eve-enslers-take-on-it/
Marc77: “tipping going back to ice age”.
Really this bogus concept of the unseen, unpredictable, unscientific “tipping point” is an extension of the climate multiplier that we originally saw used to explain the greater increase/decrease in global temperature than the direct change in radiation from the Milankovitch cycles would allow.
At that time, they introduced the idea of increasing snow having an effect on sunlight absorption, allowing them to say: “when it gets colder, there is a multiplier to that cooling ”
Effectively, climate “science” accepted as “science” the idea that you can find a cause which partly explains something, and then magically make it fit the real results using a “multiplier”.
Once you allow in such unscientific nonsense, it’s only a short step to the next phase of saying CO2 has a multiplier effect – with no idea what the multiplier mechanism is, and then extending that just a bit further removing the need for any physical stimulus and just leaving the mystical multiplier on its own (i.e. 100% of the effect is the multiplier … so no need for any physical cause and certainly no need for anything that could be subject to scientific testing)
The “tipping point” is just playing around with this mystical multiplier which allows all climate measurements to fit whatever theory you like … just add in a multiplier, and why not suddenly have an accelerating multiplier which take you over the “tipping point”.
This piece of work doesn’t pass the “science-like” test.
For one thing, it isn’t littered with terminology from “chaos theory” and so forth, such as “region of bifurcation” and “strange attractors” and “self-organization.”
How can anyone possibly have any confidence in some study that doesn’t pass the “it sounds like science” test?
” Captain Cosmic (06:54:05) :
Feel a little uncomfortable bringing this up but I’m an ecology graduate. Contrary to general belief, it’s not some pseudo-science, tree-hugging, pot-smoking discipline. It’s actually all about how members of a species interact with each other, with other species and their habitat. It’s about population dynamics, predator-prey interactions, sexual selection, in fact it’s about lots of things to do with biology, the mechanics of populations and mathematics. It has very little to do with all that hippy spiritual Gaia BS. The only thing it has in common with climate science is that modelling is very predominant. Unlike climate science however, models can easily be evaluated alongside ‘real’ observations and measurement.
Feel much better now…”
How long ago was that? When I graduated in 1970, I considered myself an ecologist – in the broadest of terms (as in “blank slate”, give me a biological problem to solve). What I was, in the vernacular of the day, and based on what I actually studied and did, I was an epizootiologist, epizootiology being simply ecology on an applied basis, and without specific frames of reference being nothing.
What I really was, was a classically and very well trained biologist working on very specific ecological problems, confined to very narrow hypotheticals. Ecology, like climatology, is not a specific discipline. but rather a holistic approach to a very narrow range of defined hypotheses or problems to be solved.
The study of “ecology” on its own, might better be described as the study of the philosophy of Chaos. Great for grad student tutorials, of no real value in finding your, or indeed, anything’s, next meal. Being an “ecologist”, “climatologist”, or “futurist” is really nothing more than being a navel-gazing philosopher. Much ado about everything, signifying nothing.
Hunter, what’s the support for your assertion that reducing CO2 emission will “wreck economies and kill millions of people?”
My earlier response was to the assertion that there had been no “global disasters” in the past. There have of course, been extinctions related to warming, like the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, which were certainly disastrous to the 50% of so of benthic creatures that died during that warming.
There aren’t any historical records of rapid CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, because it’s never happened before. It would be interesting to try and understand better what might happen, though you can never predict future climate with certainty.
It’d probably be a good first step to come up with some hypotheses, then follow up with experiments to verify or invalidate those hypotheses. People could then come after and try and replicate those results to see if they hold water. Over time, you should be able to at least come up with a rough estimate of the likely results of a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Yeah, maybe someone should get on that.
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George E. Smith (08:52:10) :
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.
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OT: but here is an open source UHF antenna that works really well. I built one out of PVC, hardware cloth, and some house electric wire I had laying around.
http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/
The clear message I get from this is that Theoretical Ecology is extremely important and budgets and paychecks need to be larger. It’s examples like this from the University of California that help the State financial insolvency. Personally, I’m amazed that departments like this exist at all.
steven mosher (08:21:53) :
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.
My father was a Navel aviator in WWII. He had this to say about worry, “If something is bothering you then try to think of something you can do to make it better. If you can think of something then spend all your time and energy doing it. If you can’t think of anything that will make it better then worrying will not help either.”
I don’t think that there is a single thing that we can do about the weather in the short run nor the climate in the long run. But there is something we can do about the scaming bums trying to “redistribute” our wealth.
November 11th in the USA cannot come soon enough.
Anybody thinking of donating to UC Davis should write the University’s President a letter instead explaining why you chose not to.
Mike Ramsey
“Theoretical ecologists” such as Hastings seem to have a propensity for building large models that seem to correlate well with past events, but not so well with future events.
They tweak the models when new data comes in, and then claim that the new predictions are even better than the last — after all, they correctly “predict” the present conditions now. And they point out areas where the model was “generally correct” before, ignoring areas where it was not.
This is a variation of the “fortune-tellers” fallacy: Repeat things that are obviously true, speculate on things that are likely true, incorporate new information from the “mark”, craft statements that can be interpreted to be true regardless of what happens, and distract the “mark” from any statements that are wrong.
Pretty soon, people start believing, and in many cases the fortune tellers themselves start to “buy their own con” and believe.
With this level of belief, perhaps they should be called “theological ecologists”.
I think I read a paper on tipping points before. Its an unseen, unpredictable force that can emerge without warning and cause extensive damage and the only prevention is to take action in accordance with those who know exactly what the unseen unpredicatable force is all about. I know I read something similar before. I think they called it smiting though, not tipping?
Lightning Bolt. Thunder.
Shaman – spirits angry. must be appeased. bring much gold. store in my tent.
@george E. Smith
Regardless of what you think about AGW, time-variable pricing for electricity (and to a lesser extent gas) is a good idea – it’s just not been practical to implement until the last few years.
The reason it’s a good idea is that there are huge peaks and troughs in demand. The network needs to have enough capacity on stand by to meet the peaks, which means there is a lot of capacity sitting around unused most of time – capital tied up in equipment that is under-utilised (that ultimately the end-users are paying for) – as well as the costs such as efficiency losses of starting and stopping power generation or gas pumping (which end-users also ultimately pay for).
Time-variable pricing can be used to create an economic incentive for individuals and business to vary their usage patterns (assuming the same or perhaps even more usage) so as to reduce the peaks and troughs.
Just a pondering…what kind of record has this “expert” Hastings had so far?
“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.
What these “experts of nothing”, and therefore “experts of everything” have to worry about is “global drought” of taxpayer grants . . . the drying up part. Funding with taxpayer money those who would only make up boogieman stories to frighten the public into giving them more money to come up with more frightening tales is the ultimate stupidity. Best to leave the “end of the world” fiction up to the Hollywood types.
Climate is no more than a succession of weather events over a local area, and there is no such thing as a “global” climate. There is also no way possible to accurately determine the “average” temperature of Planet Earth. At best, those temperature measuring stations measure local temperatures, and as Anthony has ably demonstrated, it is quite uncertain to even know what it is that is being measured, but it is quite certain that at many temperature measuring stations, it is not even the temperature of the air that is being measured. GIGO no longer applies. It has become Garbage In, Fantasy Out. GIFO is now a better acronym to describe the process.
So we are near a tipping point we can’t predict? Lovely. The earth will enter a runaway greenhouse and end up like Venus at 700 degrees. Panic everyone, panic! Oh wait there is a breaking headline, the earth is entering a new ice age and we’ll be short of fresh water and billions of people will die from starvation! Panic everyone, panic!
Of course we have no idea what to do so lets give buckets of tax money to Al Gore and the carbon traders and let them geo-engineer our way out of whatever comes along.
Sad thing is most people will fall for it.
Time magazine blaiming AGW for the DC blizzards, PBS still carrying on with National Geographic about Man-made global warming, other oblivious media (New York Times, ect., ect.)
This guy is just a sign — they’re doubling down hard — pushing all their chips out onto the table — political chips.
Gary (08:31:10) : Beautiful panorama. We need positive stories to oppose to all those apocalyptical ones. But too much oxygen increases oxidation and increased oxidation shortens life. BTW, we need oxygen to oxidize venous blood’s containing Fe+2 into Fe+3 and turn it into arterial blood hemoglobin, that is an oxidation process where, in the end, what we need it’s just electrons…an alternative to think it over☺
There is now convincing scientific evidence that the increase in CO2 concentrations has caused significantly increases in the rate of green plant growth over the past half century or so. (And greenhouse operators enrich the CO2 levels to significantly increase all plant growth in greenhouses). Increased plant growth equates to increased food production. Lowering the rate of food production, which most certainly would occur with a reduction of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, would inevitably lead to significant increases in war and mayhem on a world wide basis.
Those who call themselves “Greens” lie, through either design or ignorance. A reduction of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would cause the environment to be less green, and not more green. Flat out lies.
If you live in the UK, you need to see what a group of MP’s have signed up to in your name:
http://blackswhitewash.com/2010/02/10/uk-parliament-we-need-to-watch-the-back-door/
Absolutely fundamentalist madness.
In the sciences, when factors are well within their normal range, then they can be expected to behave normally – even law is practiced this way. To hypothesize that there might be some critical combination of normal values that triggers a tipping point is to create boogey men under the bed for little children.
Beware the Precautionary Principle in sheep’s clothing. They will claim that, until we have experienced ever possible combination of normal conditions, then we cannot say with certainty that some apparently normal day might not be a catastrophic tipping point and the climate will implode. This begs rational thinking and should be rejected and repelled with great energy.
Tipping points are evil when discussed under normal conditions. Since nothing is “runaway”, they can only speculate. To pretend that we will be burning fossil fuels for the next 100 years is to ignore technological progress and pretend status quo conditions for humanity and its development. Status quo does not exist in the human existence. We are also very good at adapting.
Time-variable pricing can be used to create an economic incentive for individuals and business to vary their usage patterns (assuming the same or perhaps even more usage) so as to reduce the peaks and troughs.”
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. Really what these billing cycles do is subsidize the cost to industry, as my average homeowner’s cost will be several cents/kw-hr above what industry will pay, even though I’m a minor user. Meanwhile, the cities in which I live and work remain lit up with megawatts of frivolous architectural and high cut-off lighting.
George E. Smith (08:52:10) :Like Discovery, History, etc. Do its owners share something in common with the ones behind global warming/climate change?
Not the “scientist”puppets of course, but the real guys behind. Just to ponder not to tell.