From the talk not action department and TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN comes this laughable press release:
![the_end[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/the_end1.png?quality=75)
Policy makers and ecologists must develop a more constructive dialogue to save the planet
Dublin, Ireland, Tuesday July 19, 2016 – An international consensus demands human impacts on the environment “sustain”, “maintain”, “conserve”, “protect”, “safeguard”, and “secure” it, keeping it within “safe ecological limits”. But, a new Trinity College Dublin-led study that assembled an international team of environmental scientists shows that policy makers have little idea what these terms mean or how to connect them to a wealth of ecological data and ideas.
Progress on protecting our planet requires us to dispel this confusion, and the researchers have produced a framework to do just that.
Ian Donohue, assistant professor at Trinity, and leader of this study, said: “Human actions challenge nature in many ways. We lump these into a grab-bag of ideas we call ecological stability. We want nature to be stable in some sense of that word. But what do we know about stability from our theories and experiments? And how can that knowledge help policy makers? We offer some solutions to these important questions.”
In the paper published today in the journal Ecology Letters, Donohue and an international team of colleagues outline exactly what policy makers, ecological experimenters, and theoreticians all think about this term “stability.”
The answer is very different things — and there’s a real problem with this lack of agreement. Professor Donohue said: “We need to be talking about the same things, using the same language, so that what ecologists know can sensibly inform the choices of policy makers.”
“Consider this example” says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Chair of Conservation at Duke University, in the USA, and one of the paper’s co-authors. “There’s a lot of discussion about “tipping points” — the idea that there are boundaries beyond which, if we push nature it will collapse. There may be places where this happens, but while nature may work this way sometimes, there is no compelling argument that it must always.”
Why should this matter? Pimm responds: “if politicians think there are tipping points and the world hasn’t collapsed thus far, then it encourages policies that continue to degrade our world. If there isn’t a catastrophe so far, why worry? The more likely alternative is not a sudden change, but a progressive loss of fisheries, croplands, damage to all our natural worlds. A wrong view of nature can have disastrous consequences.”
So what can we do? Professor Donohue and his colleagues believe that the solution is to recognise that nature responds to human pressures in complex ways, even as policy makers often demand simple solutions. Acknowledging the need for better communication on the science-policy interface is essential.
Policy makers sometimes have designed crisp, clearly defined targets, such as several of those for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services — a body broadly based on the more familiar IPCC that deals with climate change. “That’s good. The issue is when they have not. Our work identifies those discrepancies,” argues Donohue. “And we suggest solutions.”
Unfortunately, most of the policies examined by Professor Donohue and his colleagues contain terms that are ambiguous, or have multiple definitions that mean different things to different people. The recently announced United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are no exception.
Professor Donohue added: “This ambiguity is a huge problem as it means that we cannot measure progress, or indeed a lack of progress, towards achieving policy goals. This paralyses policy. Ecologists, policymakers and practitioners urgently need to develop a shared language in order to be more effective in managing the world’s ecosystems — our life-support system.”
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I think they are saying we are in danger of not understanding the tipping point of recognizing the tipping point of when we will reach the tipping point of the tipping point. Got it? 😉
I believe that’s just for unknowntipping points.
“Policy makers have little idea what these terms mean or how to connect them to a wealth of ecological data and ideas.” They are certainly right here at least. Some of the confusion is deliberate because terms are used like “Climate Change” which have multiple and no meanings. “Unfortunately, most of the policies examined by Professor Donohue and his colleagues contain terms that are ambiguous, or have multiple definitions that mean different things to different people.” Mostly though “Policy Makers” have no idea that they are being well and truly conned by people with extreme Left ideals, or an equal number of extremely greedy people who want to transfer wealth from the poor to themselves without being noticed.
Steve C, that was Aesop.
“Ecologists, policymakers and practitioners urgently need to develop a shared language…”
They already have three shared languages: Academese, Word Salad and Management-Speak.
I thought the common language of science is math — not so? (Burn down the faculty clubs!)
Maths is not a single language- its a group. Complex, Real….
This is not about saving the planet, it is about saving the narrative that so far has been so successful at juicing funding for the efforts of progressive post-modernists to coerce free people into accepting more socialism, less liberty and bigger government.
The trouble is that environmental “scientists” need ways of continuing to feather their own nests, whilst appearing to “save the planet” while policy makers need ways of keeping political power whilst fleecing taxpayers and ratepayers whilst appearing to “save the planet”. They need to work together more, and come up with a common language, thereby benefiting both. Win-win.
Which part of climate change are they hoping to protect us from? The peaks or the valleys?
http://lgge.osug.fr/IMG/fparrenin/articles/barker-science2011.pdf
I’m a peak gal all the way. Save me from the ice, not the plant food.
The only climate change catastrophe I’ve seen here in Florida is a drought of catastrophic hurricanes.
I’m pretty sure models called for more dangerous hurricanes.
Has anyone explained how CAGW is causing climate improvement?
I guess it’s just one more for the Social Benefit of Carbon.
“So what can we do? Professor Donohue and his colleagues believe that the solution is to recognise that nature responds to human pressures in complex ways”
It means the response to a “lover” pressure also will be complex. Unfortunately he gives no clue about the outcome of the complexity, so the best solution will be not to change anything, and just wait to se in what unexpected complex way it evolves and take measures, like humans have allways done.
I believe Murphy also works for climate.
“We need to be talking about the same things, using the same language, so that what ecologists know can sensibly inform the choices of policy makers.”
We need to be talking about the same things, using the same language, so that what economists know can sensibly inform the choices of policy makers.
Unfortunately, most of the policies examined by Professor Donohue and his colleagues contain terms that are ambiguous, or have multiple definitions that mean different things to different people.
For example the word “nature.”
and data
Being from Dublin this is somehow oddly embarrassing. Ireland has not been at the forefront of alarmism.
NASA did butcher our temp record from Dublin airport though, an airport that has grown significantly since the 70s but they still butchered it anyway.
Ireland also had no summer until yesterday, and worst summer in 70 years 2015. GW doesn’t have much traction with the public there, austerity at the hands of the EU on the other hand 😀
If they really want to end the ambiguity, they have to define what it is that would falsify their pet theory. As long as they insist that both hot and cold, more ice and less ice, more storms and fewer storms are all evidences of global warming, there will always be ambiguity and distrust. That’s because if everything that happens is proof of climate change, then we are dealing with politics and personal beliefs, not science.
There problem is not with the words: “sustain”, “maintain”, “conserve”, “protect”, “safeguard”, and “secure”, but with the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
The earth has warmed less than one degree centigrade since 1850, and food supply, life expectancy, and GDP per capita have all soared. The earth has been greening for at least the last 35 years. This, they wish to define as ‘bad’. Of course, they are having a problem with the lexicon.
“sustain”, “maintain”, “conserve”, “protect”, “safeguard”, and “secure””
For Whom?
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
It would be most helpful and constructive to start by saving science, science process, and science education from advocacy lies and advocacy misinformation campaigns. This is not the first great advocacy over reach campaign so it should not be that hard to spot it and examine the implications of it. Unfortunately, there is never enough self examination of these cases and their full consequences so they keep coming up as best practice approaches among the zealots and their consultants.
If there are “tipping points” as a mental construct of possible ecosystem response, I wonder why the opposite construct, the existence of “stopping points” has not been considered. Is this not socially conceivable? Stopping points are points at which further injection of a stimulus to a system produces no measurable response. For example, graphing Arctic ice extent Sept minima to CO2 has an expected strong, inverse relationship that stops at 380 ppm and then flatlines. Is this not a stopping point?
How hilarious as soon as ambiguity is seen as a problem they want to ditch it . So for the last 20 years shifting definitions and goal posts wasn’t a problem but now it is? That’s what happens when your audience starts comparing assertions with reality. Language is not their problem. Reality is.
Long ago, in the early seventies, I was in school and was considering going into the international law/relations realm as a vocation. It soon became apparent to me that the curriculum was basically Machiavellian control freak training, and the smallish classes were dominated by social misfits/outcasts and dorky narcissistic wannabes. I had “visions” of the future/present . . and even tried in my young American idealist way to warn them of what I saw . . before easing on out of there with a sort of ticking time-bomb angst in the back of my mind.
Houston, we have a very serious problem . . and it’s not stupidity, I warn.
No it’s ideology. The ideology that the party must continue to expand exponentially forever, despite any finite limit.
I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can say that will save the planet, although a few chants couldn’t hurt.
My advice to these APS sufferers (Arrested Puberty Syndrome) is to (1) grow up, (2) using knowledge structures instead of belief structures tends to lead to more rational results, and (3) have a good long think about just when we live.
Such statements like:
“But what do we know about stability from our theories and experiments?”
means that reality is not actually in this. Climate stability at the normal natural end of an interglacial is not a matter of theory, and the experiment we are presently conducting is only a few centuries old now. The Holocene, this precious little interglacial in which all of human civilization has occurred, is presently 11,719 years old (+/- 99 years), or almost exactly half a precession cycle old. Only one post-Mid Pleistocene Transition (MPT) interglacial has lasted longer than about half a precession cycle. That should be your first clue.
It is what happens when you run with that clue that will bring you to two conclusions: (1) well, if we are at the end of the Holocene, what did the ends of the other post-MPT interglacials look like, and (2) could CO2/AGW function to extend the Holocene?
The ends of the other post-MPT extreme interglacials (meaning those that reached at least our temps and sea levels) show strong evidence of climate instability on a scale from 1 to 2 orders of magnitude greater than the worst case prognostications of the IPCC/Gore crowd have yet to crank out from their Playstations. It reminds me of an adolescent walking down the tracks swatting at a wasp while a Milankovic climate freight train bears down on them.
The end of the last, most recent, and therefore best preserved interglacial was described as early as 1996 at a “Climatic Madhouse”, with extremely rapid climate shifts between earth’s warm and cold states. It consisted of at least 2 quite extreme positive thermal excursions with near glacial climate in between. And in just a few centuries. As with MIS-19 and MIS-11, the last thermal was the strongest, yielding somewhere between +6.0 to +52.0 meters of sea level rise, or from 1 to almost 2 orders of magnitude greater than the AR4 worst case scenario of +0.6 meters by 2099. Detailed studies provide data supporting multiple fits and starts throughout each thermal reversal that literally define the intelligence capacity of the adolescent mind.
+0.6 meters (AR4), +0.8 meters (AR5)? Yeah, we have many of them during each of the 2 strong thermal positive excursions at the end of the Eemian. Which of those will “ours” be at the end of the Holocene? Was it the simultaneous discovery of beans and salsa that did the Eemian in? Did we then ban beans and salsa so that we could enjoy the Wisconsin ice age?
Because that is more or less the question facing Homo sapiens sapiens here at the half precession old Holocene:
“The possible explanation as to why we are still in an interglacial relates to the early anthropogenic hypothesis of Ruddiman (2003, 2005). According to that hypothesis, the anomalous increase of CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere as observed in mid- to late Holocene ice-cores results from anthropogenic deforestation and rice irrigation, which started in the early Neolithic at 8000 and 5000 yr BP, respectively. Ruddiman proposes that these early human greenhouse gas emissions prevented the inception of an overdue glacial that otherwise would have already started.”
conclude Muller and Pross (2007)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ulrich_Mueller7/publication/222561971_Lesson_from_the_past_present_insolation_minimum_holds_potential_for_glacial_inception/links/0c96051e593f3a593d000000.pdf
I’m 62, and a licensed practicing geologist. I do not actually care all that much what the kids do. I just wanna watch. I’ve been doing high-level litigation support on environmental matters for a quarter century now. That is because for over 30 years now I have been cleaning up the meanest of our toxic cocktails, from trans-uranic wastes through refineries and chemical plants/dumps to rocket fuels. I also well understand the dominant role climate change has played during our own evolution.
So, the recent climate change debate has crystallized in my mind as the most definitive intelligence test ever devised. I say go ahead, strip the climate security blanket from the late Holocene atmosphere. But be quick about it, OK? Remember, I just wanna watch. The sun has gone all quiet on us. And at 11,719 years old, why would this not be the tipping point into the next glacial? Well, if the kids are actually right about CO2/AGW then there is only one reason we are still experiencing interglacial warmth: CO2/AGW. Now this does not mean that I agree that doubling CO2 will somehow negate its present near IR saturation.
But it does beggar the rational imagination as regards what to do about CO2.AGW.
1) strip the heathen devil AGW gases out of the late Holocene atmosphere and take your chances with glacial inception?
2) or stuff as much “climate security blanket” up there as you possibly can, while you still can. Why? Because you actually do understand the precautionary principle……
“Investigating the processes that led to the end of the last interglacial period is relevant for understanding how our ongoing interglacial will end, which has been a matter of much debate…..”
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416 Wm2, which is the 65oN July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428 Wm2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the [glacial] inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.”
http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~born/share/papers/eemian_and_lgi/sirocko_seelos05.nat.pdf
So there it is “kids”. No theory, just the most interesting experiment H. sapiens sapiens may ever embark on. Of all previous species of the genus Homo, sapiens sapiens is the least well-adapted for abrupt climate change ever. Few of us, given even iron-age tools, would survive the abrupt and extreme climate changes which dominate glacial inception. Which, as a geologist, is why I just wanna watch.
The irony here is off the charts. Unless, of course, you are truly an environmentalist. If the kids are correct about CO2/AGW, then the only thing standing between the end of the Holocene and gaia’s next regularly scheduled descent into the next post-MPT interglacial are our GHG emissions. End that and let nature take its course. ~90kyrs of ice age makes for a beautiful genetic filter.
As I watch the evolution of election year politics I find that I am not all that much in favor of “business as usual”. More and more I find myself leaning towards the philosophy of “I suggest a new strategy R2, let the Wookie(s) win”. A “beautiful genetic filter” is just what we need. We might just net a better Homo…..
“An examination of the fossil record indicates that the key junctures in hominin evolution reported nowadays at 2.6, 1.8 and 1 Ma coincide with 400 kyr eccentricity maxima, which suggests that periods with enhanced speciation and extinction events coincided with periods of maximum climate variability on high moisture levels.” Trauth et al, Quaternary Science Reviews 28 (2009) 399–411
As we are at a poorly-adapted hominid state at an eccentricity minima, not an eccentricity maxima, the next leap in humanity might actually be up to us this time.
Meanwhile, back at my Sierra ranch, I graduate from “maker” to “taker” class in a month. Since the Demobrat dissolution of the Social Security trust fund in 1968, I have been paying for your progressive agenda. So now you owe me, unless you are mere thieves/hypocrits. So get all “progressive”, but get back to work (funding my imminent SSN checks). Theory is one thing, experiments are quite another. The reality of social experiments are a bee-atch, aren’t they? I await your bureaucratically taxed (more gov’ment costs mo money) tax revenues.
So, to all the mewling quim, enjoy the interglacial…….while it lasts.
Or take a shot at ending it. Either way, you will be funding my retirement, for as long as I can politically ensure that you can. Just to keep you fiscally/ideologically honest. Even though abrupt climate change appears to happen within a single year, the political constructs of H. sapiens take a bit longer to materialize. It doesn’t matter in my case. Because:
THEORY:
It was only a minor extension of the theory of retirement that I planned a remote repose of an alpine ranch with lots of annual deadfall (recyclable carbon/energy), a captive watershed and just below treeline solar/wind capture availability/short transmission distance, excellent defensive position property. I have since come to recognize this as the “survivalist”” mentality. Though not so applicable to one with no offspring in the offing. Without question, at over a mile high climate change is on my agenda. But with my remaining lifespan, a large woodpile and a couple of greenhouses goes a long way towards neutering that. The mewling quim will not neuter AGW/GHGs in the atmospheric lifetime of existing GHGs. Which will likely exceed mine.
EXPERIMENT:
The only abrupt climate change I am concerned about, for the remainder of the time I am here, consists of wildfire mitigation. At altitude, and in deep older forest, summer insolation has not proved to be a problem this first year. Trimming and stockpiling forest fuels has been a good pastime. Cutting a firebreak is occurring apace.
SOLUTION(S):
Brilliant, William. I am only a couple years behind you in retiring to my ranch at 7000′ MSL on the Colorado Plateau, where I will also be engaged in gathering concentrated heat in the form of wood. Winters can see a good bit of snow there, and overnight temps below zero. I hope the interglacial hangs on a few more decades, as I really love the summers up there!