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.
…
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
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?
The mere fact that not a single one of their predictions has ever come true, doesn’t slow these guys down.
Mathematical onanism. They better stop or they will develop acne.
Or go blind! Wait, they’re already blind.
I remember another domino effect, Vietnam. It never happened.
So it’s back to the good ol’ tipping points, is it? Haven’t heard that term used for a good couple of years now.
News flash! The climate seesaws and humans evolve/adapt-
‘Climate Seesaw’ Spurred Human Evolution in Africa For Millennia, Scientists Say (msn.com)
Careful chaps as this sort of impure thinking could lead to…gulp…the dark side and denial of the human caused dooming with no more grants for you.
If a scientist is WARNING of something, then he is either making a prediction to be tested and challenged and possibly falsified, or he is a priest in a cult, making prophecy for a herd of religious believers.
When the Miller-ites and all the other believers associated with what is now the Seventh Day Adventist church, LIVED through their predicted end of times, they didn’t call it “The Great Relief” or “The Great Deliverance.” No, they called it “The Great Disappointment.” They WANTED to be wiped out by God / Providence.
To the degree that they are serious about their warnings, and not just economic frauds and scammers (which abound in the our governmental bureaucracies and educational cesspools known as research universities), modern day CAGW alarmists are simply additional flavors of irrational doomsayers and predictors of the Apocalypse. They are modern-day Millerites and Branch Davidians and People’s temple cultists, hoping for the end of the world. Because they hate humans and human accomplishment, human thriving. That’s what misanthropes do, particularly Malthusian misanthropes. We need to call out these extreme beliefs among the so-called “scientific” consensus and to label fanatics as cultists when they abandon scientific objectivity in an attempt to pimp their predictions. NPR will hate being called a cult. BBC, MS-NBC will hate it. But we must do it, because we value accuracy and objectivity and history.
The very scientific Monte Carlo approach.
Remember the Chevrolet Monte Carlo? The poor man’s Impala and a competitor to the Chrysler Cordoba. Apparently these old rust buckets have found a second life as an important tool in climate science.
“Tipping Points” is an over-used misnomer.