Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian, tipping points leading to irreversible climate harm and an existential threat to our civilisation may have already been crossed, though there is still time to try to undo some of the damage.
Climate emergency: world ‘may have crossed tipping points’
Warning of ‘existential threat to civilisation’ as impacts lead to cascade of unstoppable events
Damian Carrington Environment editor @dpcarrington
Thu 28 Nov 2019 05.00 AEDTThe world may already have crossed a series of climate tipping points, according to a stark warning from scientists. This risk is “an existential threat to civilisation”, they say, meaning “we are in a state of planetary emergency”.
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The planet has already heated by 1C and the temperature is certain to rise further, due to past emissions and because greenhouse gas levels are still rising. The scientists further warn that one tipping point, such as the release of methane from thawing permafrost, may fuel others, leading to a cascade.
The researchers, writing in a commentary article in the journal Nature, acknowledge that the complex science of tipping points means great uncertainty remains. But they say the potential damage from the tipping points is so big and the time to act so short, that “to err on the side of danger is not a responsible option”. They call for urgent international action.
“A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping could still be under our control to some extent,” they write. “The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action – not just words – must reflect this.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/27/climate-emergency-world-may-have-crossed-tipping-points
The quoted Nature article is like the Guardian article, except not as well written – basically a flat demand we do what we are told.
Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against
The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must compel political and economic action on emissions.
Timothy M. Lenton, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
…
Here we summarize evidence on the threat of exceeding tipping points, identify knowledge gaps and suggest how these should be plugged. We explore the effects of such large-scale changes, how quickly they might unfold and whether we still have any control over them.
In our view, the consideration of tipping points helps to define that we are in a climate emergency and strengthens this year’s chorus of calls for urgent climate action — from schoolchildren to scientists, cities and countries.
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Act now
In our view, the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute (see ‘Emergency: do the maths’).
EMERGENCY: DO THE MATHS
We define emergency (E) as the product of risk and urgency. Risk (R) is defined by insurers as probability (p) multiplied by damage (D). Urgency (U) is defined in emergency situations as reaction time to an alert (τ) divided by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T). Thus:
E = R × U = p × D × τ / T
The situation is an emergency if both risk and urgency are high. If reaction time is longer than the intervention time left (τ / T > 1), we have lost control.
We argue that the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best. Hence we might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping — and hence the risk posed — could still be under our control to some extent.
The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action — not just words — must reflect this.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
Their unphysical climate models contain hidden errors at least an order of magnitude greater than the alleged CO2 signal, they can’t actually tell you how much influence CO2 has on global temperature, none of the disasters they claim are imminent have actually happened, yet they claim they can put meaningful values into the terms of their insurance risk equation.
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Soooooo many tipping points , most of them unprecedented and catastrophic as well. We go round this loop every generation or two and learn nothing from history, but carry on, its a living for some.
Meanwhile I am enjoying a very mild spring and entry to Summer. The sky is a bit blue, the grass a bit green , the temp a bit mild, all the hallmarks of an imminent emergency.
At least the picture shows someone with sandwich boards. Thank goodness laptops haven’t completely take over yet. Repent, The End is Nigh. /sarc
SMC
Sadly, it’s a programmable whiteboard operated from a cellphone. Updated hourly as the next scare story comes along.
It is so saddening to see how our news agencies have strayed from the path they so proudly commenced on along with the European enlightenment, that amazing wave of rational, intellectual and humanistic understanding of our human condition which swept over Europe and America (e.g. founding the US constitution) from the mid 18th century. They promised to uphold a self-imposed code of ethics – including always writing the truth as close as they could honestly get to it, with fairness and balance.
Look at the riff-raff now, brazenly just out to make headlines to whip up hysteria and alarm among gullible people. It’s disgusting.
I guess that’s it then, the alarmists have used up their last scare tactic. If we are past the tipping point there is nothing we can do, CO2 will keep rising even if we shut down everything and every human leaves the planet. It’s like waiting for the asteroid to hit, can’t stop it can’t get out of its way so why bother doing anything.
The Guardian is similarly concerned about “too many white girls next door” in the Olympics. Another color judgment forced by what is ostensibly bad judgment.
When in danger
Or in doubt,
Run in circles,
Scream and Shout!!
As soon as I read the words ‘existential threat’ I know the person who wrote it has no idea what they are talking about! The newspeak* ridiculousness of this meaningless cliche goes straight over the heads of the stupid. I want to ask them, why not simply say what you mean? “The very existence of civilisation itself, is threatened…” is that what you mean?
I’ve said it many times before, existential literally means ‘real’ or ‘exists but more importantly, historically and denotatively,** it has always referred to the technical philosophical term meaning; ‘immanent’ i.e The entire threat exists only in your own mind!
*noun [mass noun] ambiguous euphemistic language used chiefly in political propaganda.
**Not to be confused with imminent (“about to occur”) or immanant (“a certain type of scalar property of a matrix”).
Scott W Bennett
Ah! But to the great ill educated unwashed (and I include myself in that category) it sounds sciency (except, like you, I have, and use a dictionary).
(Seriously, friends of my wife and I laugh at us because one of the most prominent books in our collection is a large Collins English Dictionary. We even got excited at an exhibition when we could actually handle the complete, printed OED, which is just enormous!).
Go Funk & Wagnalls…I’ve got two!
Rahmstorf and Schellnhuber are only publishing this garbage tipping-point alarmism in order to get it into IPCC AR6, and then ultimately in the SPM.
Expect to see this doomster cargo-cult equation re-produced and appear somewhere in AR6, my guess is likely in the WG3 report.
Joel O’Bryan
November 27, 2019 at 8:21 pm
Yes, I think you’re right…this will give the allure of mathematical legitimacy to their rubbish…they’ve been waiting for decades for this. The press will love it too…you can’t argue with maths can you….look how superior we all are compared to the illiterate redneck oil funded deniers!
Their big tipping point comes when they receive their latest government grant for spreading the ‘climate change’ faith.
“If their brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow their hats off”. Roughly paraphrasing Kilgore Trout, aka Kurt Vonnegut
I thought it was”to blow the wax out of their ears”.
lee
Blow their nose?
Overreach, overreach, overreach! Soon Pres Trump will have all the evidence he needs to walk away from the IPCC and its hysterical claims, the Greens and all their camp-followers. He remembers Napoleon’s famous quip: ‘Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake’!
I find it weird that these geniuses never “to hell with it we’re done”, there’s always time for the government to “do something”, but just barely- well if the hopes of the world rest on governments, elected or not to save us, screw it we’re done for sure!!
I remember signs like that when I was a schoolboy.
70 years later and they are still using the same sign.
So much for progress.
Shows they are ‘green’ & recycling !
If we’ve already crossed it, but it can be even partly un-crossed, is it really a tipping point?
If one is to be a nihilist hysteric, at least be committed to the role.
There are no tipping points, only tripping points.
Look on the bright side.
The alarmists are forced to focus on human influence on climate, because that is where the IPCC is tasked to look. Consequently, the state grants that are required to study human influence on climate, prevent them looking at other causes. We should be thankful for that. Humans can argue and fight back against the nonsense, presented as research by the so called climate scientists. This forces them to become ever more irrational and ever more excited, about ever less evidence of human induced climate change.
Had the IPCC been tasked with proving trees cause climate change, the Hansons, Gores and Mann types in the world, would have felled the whole lot by now, just in case because trees can’t fight back against such lunatics.
Clearly, a lunacy tipping point has been crossed since someone forgot to lock the climate madhouse door.
“Clearly, a lunacy tipping point has been crossed”
Yes, it has.
Alarmists are living in an alternate, delusional reality. And they want the rest of us to live in it, too. No, thanks..
A tipping point in climate science is a moment in time when some of their tribe are soliciting for a big tip – again – from government or rich NGOs: minimum 5 zeros at the end. A trip to a far off tropical or fancy COPxx might also do. Beggars belief but they are the biggest beggars on this planet.
The appears to be a summary giving us expert “opinion.”
Lenton, et al., 2019 cites two papers, one Lenton, et al, 2008, still seven authors, changed some, but good old Joachim still brought up the end. Other is IPCC.
https://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786
First line of abstract of 2008 paper–
“The term “tipping point” commonly refers to a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system. Here we introduce the term “tipping element” to describe large-scale components of the Earth system that may pass a tipping point.”
Appeal to authority in the paper–retract it, you don’t have to know the subject.
“Results from the expert elicitation…”
Tipping points and cascades are also big fad in some areas of ecology. Also should refer to paper sequences, walked too close to the edge of the cliff.
‘The complex science of tipping points’.
Now there’s something new! I used to apply the complex science of tipping in restaurants, but clearly have always done it wrong; I should have added the points.
Surely if we’ve already reached the tipping point, there’s no sense in wasting more money and effort trying to combat Armageddon? We might just as well carry on as normal, and enjoy the ride…
We define climate emergency (E) as the product of risk and urgency. Risk (R) is defined by climate troughers as probability (p) multiplied by damage to government funding (D). Urgency (U) is defined in emergency situations as reaction time to a Climategate type alert (τ) divided by the intervention time left to arrange for a favourable judicial enquiry by green blobbers (T). Thus:
E = R × U = p × D × τ / T
Can’t spell. Obviously it’s a case of the doomsdayers have E R U P T e D
I laughed all the way through your post, leitmotif! Thanks for that. 🙂
Another “Carrington” event?
400,000+/- years ago in Germany, Hoomans were hunting horses, red deer and bison for food. When a coal mine was proposed for the area, archaeologists went in first to see if there was anything – any antiquity of value – that could be found.
What they found was the remains of a camp site, with an ancient fire circle, double-pointed spears (javelins) for adults and smaller versions for children, stone axes and the remains of horses, red deer and bison that had been successfully brought down and turned into food. This took place during a warming period. Then the ice sheets returned. OOOOppppssss!
Sooooo — just what was going on in Germany at that time????? “….sandwiched between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations, and situated within a well-studied sedimentary sequence.”[5] More recently, thermoluminescence dating of heated flints in a deposit beneath that which contained the spears suggested that the spears were between 337,000 and 300,000 years old.[6] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoningen_spears **
So Heidelbergensis, who predated Neanderthalis, was in that area during a warm interval, hunting for food. Nothing unusual going on there.
In fact: Wooden artifacts from the Palaeolithic age are very rarely delivered to posterity. Beside Schöningen, finds are the Clacton Spear from Clacton-on-Sea (England),[17] Torralba (Spain),[18] Ambrona (Spain)[19] and Bad Cannstatt (Germany/Baden-Wuerttemberg),[20] of which only the Clacton Spear has been preserved. The artificial character of calcified lumbers from the discovery site Bilzingsleben is debatable.[21][22] A wooden stabbing lance from Lehringen, also from Lower Saxony, was found underneath the skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant and is aged approximately 125,000 years, so it is much younger. The elephant was possibly killed by it.[23]**
**I don’t normally quote Wikipedia, but that article does have citations to research. My first view of this discovery came in the early 2000s in a magazine article. I still have that some place.
Tipping points? I’d like to give those clown some tipping points, but they won’t listen, so they can just suffer through this cold, wet winter and holler “globulll warmunism” all they like. With a dormant sun and an eroding magnetic field, we are not heading into a warmer climate. Tempestuous? Probably a big “YES” on that, and no real preparedness for it.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf comes to mind. It is a very old tale, and everyone intuitively knows the moral of the story. But focus for a moment on the motivations of the boy in the story. What does he get out of crying “Wolf!” Why does he do it?
Well, he gets attention. People who otherwise wouldn’t notice the boy if he were on fire suddenly pay attention. Initially, the boy is praised for sounding the alarm. Why? Because a wolf running loose in the local environs would decimate their sheep herds, which local townspeople depend upon for the livelihoods. A wolf hits them in the pocketbook.
At first, crying “Wolf!” was all reward and no risk. The boy got noticed and praised for sounding the alarm, not just once, but several times. It only became a problem for the boy when the locals finally caught on to what the boy was doing. A “tipping point” was reached, and the townspeople no longer paid any attention to his cries, no matter how loudly he yelled or how long he kept it up. And when an actual wolf appeared . . . Well, you know the story.
We find ourselves in a similar situation with regard to climate apocalypsism. Fonzi’s motorcycle is airborne. The end is nigh, but not in the way the warm-mongers want us to believe. It was one thing to predict dire consequences 50 or 100 years into the future, when most people who have heard or read the warnings will have been dead and thus unable to refute the predictions. Now it’s different. Now the dire consequences are within the lifetime of the audience. Twelve years, 10, 8 years 7 months, etc. The boy has yelled “Wolf!” several times already, and the townspeople are beginning to wise up. In response, the boy has to crank it to 11. “WOLF! WOLF! WOOOOOOOLFFFFFFF!”
The Soviet Union lasted about 70 years. An average lifetime. The current iteration of climate alarmism started in the 1980s. There’s still a ways to go to reach an average lifetime. We’re about halfway there. You might say this is climate alarmism’s midlife crisis.