Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In the face of a complete lack of problems to date, climate scientists appear to be amping up the “woo woo” factor of predicted climate catastrophes. But they are not adding a firm timescale, and refuse to call their warnings “predictions”.
Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes, warn scientists
Analysis shows significant risk of cascading events even at 2C of heating, with severe long-term effects
Damian Carrington
Environment editor @dpcarrington
Fri 4 Jun 2021 02.34 AESTIce sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis.
Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts. Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed their tipping points, meaning large sea-level rises in coming centuries.
The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement.
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“We provide a risk analysis, not a prediction, but our findings still raise concern,” said Prof Ricarda Winkelmann, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany. “[Our findings] might mean we have less time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and still prevent tipping processes.”
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“The study suggests that below 2C of global warming – ie in the Paris agreement target range – there could still be a significant risk of triggering cascading climate tipping points,” said Lenton. “What the new study doesn’t do is unpack the timescale over which tipping points changes and cascades could unfold – instead it focuses on the eventual consequences. The results should be viewed as ‘commitments’ that we may be making soon to potentially irreversible changes and cascades, leaving as a grim legacy to future generations.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/03/climate-tipping-points-could-topple-like-dominoes-warn-scientists
The abstract of the study;
Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming
Nico Wunderling1,2,3, Jonathan F. Donges1,4, Jürgen Kurths1,5, and Ricarda Winkelmann
Received: 26 Mar 2020 – Discussion started: 03 Apr 2020 – Revised: 15 Mar 2021 – Accepted: 07 Apr 2021 – Published: 03 Jun 2021
With progressing global warming, there is an increased risk that one or several tipping elements in the climate system might cross a critical threshold, resulting in severe consequences for the global climate, ecosystems and human societies. While the underlying processes are fairly well-understood, it is unclear how their interactions might impact the overall stability of the Earth’s climate system. As of yet, this cannot be fully analysed with state-of-the-art Earth system models due to computational constraints as well as some missing and uncertain process representations of certain tipping elements. Here, we explicitly study the effects of known physical interactions among the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon rainforest using a conceptual network approach. We analyse the risk of domino effects being triggered by each of the individual tipping elements under global warming in equilibrium experiments. In these experiments, we propagate the uncertainties in critical temperature thresholds, interaction strengths and interaction structure via large ensembles of simulations in a Monte Carlo approach. Overall, we find that the interactions tend to destabilise the network of tipping elements. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the qualitative role of each of the four tipping elements within the network, showing that the polar ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica are oftentimes the initiators of tipping cascades, while the AMOC acts as a mediator transmitting cascades. This indicates that the ice sheets, which are already at risk of transgressing their temperature thresholds within the Paris range of 1.5 to 2 ∘C, are of particular importance for the stability of the climate system as a whole.
Read more: https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/12/601/2021/
Imagine if someone was designing a new bridge, and the architect admitted they cannot compute the stability of the bridge or predict the time when predicted events were due to occur, due to “missing and uncertain process representations of certain tipping elements”. Would you take that analysis seriously?
Of course, if these tipping points actually existed in reality, why didn’t they happen during the Holocene Climate Optimum?
That’s the very best comment against this type of alarmism.
Always refer back to the HCO, when temperatures were 2-3 C higher than today.
It’s always the same old nonsense with the Grauniad
Today’s offering is just as amusing
“Sea ice across much of the Arctic is thinning twice as fast as previously thought, researchers have found.
…
The new research used novel computer models to produce detailed snow cover estimates from 2002 to 2018.”
Arctic sea ice thinning twice as fast as thought, study finds | Arctic | The Guardian
So much for University College London.
Another day, another alarmist yarn.
Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes, warn scientists
When you think about it – that’s about a stupid a headline as you could get. A tipping point is a tipping point, you can’t have a series of tipping points, tipping each other – that would be the definiition of a tipping point. The canonical example being a line of dominoes – where the tipping point starts the process of falling – a single tipping point. So this headline should read “Climate tipping points could be like tipping points”.
They’ve misunderstood the whole concept of tipping points.
This could have come straight from the Onion, they have come to the tipping point of being their own best lampoon – there’s no way back to credibility from there for Damian Carrington. Or the scientists from PIK. The only rational response is ridicule.
hmmm…. has the Onion ever satirized the climatistas? We should suggest it to them. Or write it for them. And maybe something on Saturday Night Live too.
Perhaps they really meant tippling points.
So they’re saying that our climate is a rigid house of cards and not a dynamic ever changing system always seeming to seek a balance that cannot be obtained? Amazing that life on earth has lasted this long.Eh?
How many of these declared “tipping points” have we blown by in the last 30 years?
They’re claiming they know how it works and proving that they don’t
Implementing foolish and rash policies to attempt to engineer climate will one day topple like dominoes and be far more devastating to the economies of many countries than any climate changes ever could.
Well, geezo Pete, the planet didn’t collapse into oblivion during the tempestuous days of the Carboniferous jungle planet, did it?
If only I could get the Doctor to let me borrow the Tardis and drag their sorry personages back to that time…. and no, I would definitely NOT give them respirators to cut the O2 content they were inhaling.
Do you think giant centipedes might spook them?
Seriously, if the planet really warmed up enough to melt all the snows everywhere, we’d have a planet with a measurably higher sea level, measurably higher O2 level, and a lotta big, ugly poisonous crawling things that would scare the living daylights out of them.
Or maybe we already have such things running for office….?
No need for the Doctor, get the ‘Primeval’ team on it!
What a miserable existence the authors must have. Spending endless hours producing one more dooms day science fiction paper among the 10s of thousands of others already produced.
This week as I finish this run I have been doing all week I have been parking along the curb of a quiet dead end street in Marion, IL. to take my 10 hour break. Yesterday the rains of the last couple days ended and returning to here via I 64 across Southern IN the cicada were singing, the sun shinning, and the rain scrubbed air wonderful to feel and breath. When I parked a mocking bird came to serenade me to sleep with his extensive Repertoire.
This truck driver wouldn’t exchange my life for theirs ever.
Interesting that the cicadas are out in Indiana. I’m in SW Ohio and I have yet to hear one.
It’s been much warmer than this 2C “tipping point” in the past.
Do they have examples from history of this tipping point taking place every time the temperatures exceed 2C above the present temperature?
And then one has to ask: What if the warming does not continue and the Earth cools instead? Perhaps these alarmist scientists are assuming too much.
Tom, don’t you realize that this time it’s different? 🙂
Climate claptrap will fall away like dominoes when reality catches up and gets past a host of barriers, ramparts, and policy misdirection plays.
PIC? Did I see PIC? Now that’s scary!
PIK, isn’t it? And yes, they do scare me – it’s like all the seriously nutty crazies are all in one place.
I love the disconnect between reality and their fantasies. As water cools, it becomes more viscous and flows more slowly and, as it warms, it flows faster, being less viscous. So, taking the Gulf Stream, which effectively keeps Western Europe about 11 deg C warmer than is would be otherwise, what happens if there was ocean warming. Well, it means W. Europe would receive more heat and become warmer, as the Gulf Stream flows faster and the water warmer a bit as well.
With ocean cooling, the Gulf Stream would slow down, being less viscous, and not only would less warm water be delivered to warm Europe but the warm water would be a bit cooler as well. This is what happens with a little ice age scenario, as a positive feedback mechanism. The contention that warming would stop the Gulf Stream is not so valid when what the Stream does is ramp up with warming.
The increasingly cold conditions in Europe bespeak that the Gulf Stream might be slowing a little.
A big domino is in fact falling now….
It remains to be seen who in the UK still has any chart reading skills and critical thinking to understand it.
NOAA SST-NorthAtlantic GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979 With37monthRunningAverage.gif (880×481) (wp.com)
That’s not a domino, it’s a headstone – just remains to be seen if we can write “RIP AGW” on it in time.
Like any professional grifter the key tenet for Climate Change scammers is: Never give up the con.
Only scoundrels and imbeciles repeat this climate doom nonsense. It is a 50-year-old fraud.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/26/michael-shellenberger-evicerates-peter-gleick/#comment-3255502
The ability to predict is the best objective measure of scientific and technical competence.
Climate doomsters have a perfect NEGATIVE predictive track record – every very-scary climate prediction, of the ~80 they have made since 1970, has FAILED TO HAPPEN.
“Rode and Fischbeck, professor of Social & Decision Sciences and Engineering & Public Policy, collected 79 predictions of climate-caused apocalypse going back to the first Earth Day in 1970. With the passage of time, many of these forecasts have since expired; the dates have come and gone uneventfully. In fact, 48 (61%) of the predictions have already expired as of the end of 2020.”
To end 2020, the climate doomsters were proved wrong in their scary climate predictions 48 times – at 50:50 odds for each prediction, that’s like flipping a coin 48 times and losing every time! The probability of that being mere random stupidity is 1 in 281 trillion! It’s not just global warming scientists being stupid.
These climate doomsters were not telling the truth – they displayed a dishonest bias in their analyses that caused these extremely improbable falsehoods, these frauds.
There is a powerful logic that says no rational person or group could be this wrong for this long – they followed a corrupt agenda – in fact, they knew they were lying.
The global warming alarmists have a NO predictive track record – they have been 100% wrong about every scary climate prediction – nobody should believe them.
The radical greens have NO credibility, make that NEGATIVE credibility – their core competence is propaganda, the fabrication of false alarm.
Source:
CLIMATE CHANGE, COVID-19, AND THE GREAT RESET
A Climate, Energy and Covid Primer for Politicians and Media
By Allan M.R. MacRae, Published May 8, 2021 UPDATE 1e
Download the WORD file
https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/climate-change-covid-19-and-the-great-reset-update-1e-readonly.docx
___________________________
I notice the study ( https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/12/601/2021/ ) references IPCC RPC 8.5 models.
Yes, chaos works in the cooling direction with falling sea levels also…..
Underwater ancient cypress forest offers clues to the past — ScienceDaily
Seems like the Guardian counts on its readers to not know history, meaning those readers who swallow this kind of garbage. If there are tipping points being surpassed now, how come there was no unstoppable warming in similar or much warmer periods in history? Why didn’t the earth’s oceans boil away after the Roman (or Medieval) warm periods? Why didn’t the poles become totally ice free then? Why isn’t most of Florida under water now? It’s too bad that most people do not learn history (including natural history/paleo history) in schools. I haven’t set foot inside a grade school in nearly 40 years, and I didn’t know about the RWP and MWP until I started reading WUWT. Relying on ignorance is a great way to propagate lies.
I spent several seconds too many skimming this. I need to read something logical and true now as an antidote. The following leader could have stood alone as an entirely true and meaningless prediction of the future:
“ Analysis shows significant risk of cascading events even at 2C of heating, with severe long-term effects”
Events will always happen and “cascade” from one to another. It is how the universe works. It will happen with 2 degrees warming or 30 degrees of cooling. Events always have severe long-term effects for someone or something somewhere. This is 100% drivel.
They carried out 3M simuations and found just a third of them featured a tipping point.
They forgot to mention that in 1/3 of their simulations an asteroid hits the earth 😀
It is like advertising a cure for a deadly disease that doesn’t exist. People normally would want to see the disease first.
The “Institute for Climate Impact Research.”
Raise your hand if you’re surprised an institute for climate impact research presents a study of scary possible impacts. Anyone? No one?
Clearly, with a such a scary scenario presented, more funding is needed for more study by the institute of climate impact research. Deposit your check in the enclosed pre-addressed stamped envelope.
It’s the Potsdam Institute once again. As Douglas Adams might have said: “They’re crazier than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide!”
Or, “Climate Toppling Points could Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Or perhaps it’s Tippling Points? That can happen if you tipple tee many martoonis.
The Guardian “could” tell the truth once in a while/ But they don’t!
If this is possible, then there should be instances of them in past climate episodes. Perhaps they could identify some.
When it comes to climate change,”tipping points” are much like “last chances” ; if one doesn’t occur, there’s always another that ‘s just over the horizon. Except not only isn’t the public unconcerned, it also stopped paying attention.