The Mayan End of the World Prediction and Climate Catastrophe

The Mayan calendar ends on December 21. The Gregorian calendar ends on December 31.
When in doubt, refer to ISO 8601.

Hugh said @ur momisugly December 18, 2012 at 7:04 pm

We should all be very concerned by this prophecy. The IPCC have made temperature predictions that go beyond December 21st along with predictions of rising anthropogenic carbon dioxide. They are thus implying that both the world and mankind will still exist, and given their track record for predicions up to this point…

Now that’s really scary…
The famous sceptical philosopher René Descartes went into his favourite bar one day and ordered a dry martini. After he had finished the drink, the bar tender asked him if he would like another. “I think not,” replied Descartes and he immediately disappeared in a puff of blue smoke!

Aikimox says:
December 18, 2012 at 3:12 pm
May I suggest you read and digest the fine post by rgb@duke qouted in part here:

“…
The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years — one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record — or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene — and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there — the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms — if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasinginly remote.
…”

Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/
*****************************
If you are not familiar with rgb@duke hang around WUWT for a while.

From Australia.
Had to laugh the other day, I listen to Triple J ( a public owned radio station that even lefties think is a bit too left), they had just finished playing a promo for their end of the world show, mocking the mayans, (yeah the one where they got our Fool of a PM to do the end of the world announcement (sigh)).
Anyhow they had just finished mocking the mayans for their predictions and went straight onto their news program, about climate change where their expert “John Cook” told us all the world was going to end!!!????
Seriously, if only they could just hear themselves….. unbelieveable

“You mean the all-knowing Mayans didn’t know about leap years? Oh the travesty!”
When you measure years by the turning of the solstices, leap years have no significance. They weren’t as stupid as you might think. They were excellent astronomers.

“Meteor collisions, alien invasions, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, and global warming”
If you include: nuclear war, global pandemic, overpopulation, peak oil, total economic collapse, rapture, global jihad, cyber world war, Carrington event, and progenitorcide (see ‘grey goo’ or ‘R.U.R.’) I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t spend a few hours each week worrying about the end of the world.

What the Mayans probably thought:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mayan%20calendar%20cartoons&gbv=2&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=574&sei=DFPRUNGeOMTW2QWSq4DADw

Erm, what time zone will first see the apocalypse?

Aikimox says: I’m a man of science…
You talk about the weather 20 years ago and compare it to today as if observations about variability during 20 years is science. If you are truly a man of science you will check the records and see what the differences really are–not give anticdotal stores–which are highly subject to confirmation bias.
Thank you D Böehm (December 18, 2012 at 3:52 pm ) for putting it so well in answer to Aikimox.
You know, over this summer in the US, we actually broke hundreds of records for all-time highs. Broke hundreds of records for cold too.
happens a lot–check this out, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/08/low-temperature-records-overwhelm-highs-in-the-usa-this-past-week-wheres-the-media-to-tell-us-how-this-should-be-viewed/
and check out this for historical facts:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/13/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-58/
During the hearing, the current drought and the recent heat wave in the US were emphasized by the Democrats and their witnesses. In the 1930s, particularly in 1934 & 1936, the US had a more extreme drought that lasted several years (the Dust Bowl) and a worse heat wave in terms of setting state-wide record temperatures. (Christy produced a chart similar to Figure 25 in http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf)
And finally: Robert Austin says: December 18, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Aikimox says:
December 18, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Aikimox’s anecdotal evidence of more frequent recent temperature extremes is not reflected in the climate data. This leads me to suspect the he/she is a concern troll.
Thank you Robert, because I’m quite sure he is not a scientist.

Watts Up With That? (obligatory snort)
You will find “watts up” when 12/21/12 comes, and your race is wiped off the earth for not faithfully cleaning the litter box of your masters! Mayans, shmayans! Mrow!

Aikimox says:
December 18, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Regarding the global warming stuff, – We ARE facing a real threat and it won’t take hundreds of years till it hits us hard…
OK, if you are so sure, give us a prediction of when; with your evidence.
Or is this just another religious belief?