Let’s sprinkle a dash of humor onto your daily helping of apocalypse stew. I’ve just read Ben Turner’s article, “Catastrophic climate ‘doom loops’ could start in just 15 years, new study warns” and boy, I thought we had at least 16 years left! Cue ominous thunderclap.
As our dear friend Turner writes,
“According to the research, more than a fifth of the world’s potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
Catastrophic tipping points? 2038? Did we just open a dystopian novel or is this reality?
The science behind these “tipping points” is apparently, as Turner writes,
“poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
If my lifelong experience of assembling IKEA furniture has taught me anything, it’s that oversimplification and poor understanding often lead to, well, collapses. You could call them “catastrophic furniture tipping points,” if you like.
And apparently,
“unlike the well-established link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change, the study of tipping points is a young and contentious science.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
As young and contentious as my neighbor’s teenage son who just got his first electric guitar, it seems. Oh, how we love to argue with nascent phenomena, whether it’s ear-piercing music or ecological doom.
“But if these simulations miss an important element or interaction, their forecasts can land decades off the mark. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations’ most important body for evaluating climate science) said in its most recent report that the Amazon rainforest could reach a tipping point that will transform it into a savannah by 2100.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
I suppose one can only be so precise when modelling the collapse of civilization. Or at least as precise as a dart game after a few drinks.
As Turner writes,
“After testing their systems across multiple modes — with just one cause of collapse acting, with multiple causes acting and with all of the causes plus the introduction of random noise to mimic fluctuations in climate variables — the scientists made some troubling findings: multiple causes of collapse acting together brought the abrupt transformation of some systems up to 80% closer to the present day.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
Oh, we do love our speculative modeling drama, don’t we? I mean, if you’re going to simulate the end of the world, why not turn it up to 11?
Finally, co-author Gregory Cooper says that their findings
“show the potential for each to reinforce the other. Any increasing pressure on ecosystems will be exceedingly detrimental and could have dangerous consequences.”
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns
Ah, the grand finale. Cooper, you’ve missed your calling as a thriller writer.
Environmental problems exist, but maybe, just maybe, instead of ringing the doomsday bell at a deafening volume, we should work on solving the problems we can see right now. You know, like my neighbor’s son who’s decided to play a guitar solo at 2 am. Let’s face it, that’s a real and imminent catastrophe.
HT/strativarius
I remember my first Electric Guitar! Totally sucked at it! It became a clothes horse before I finally sold it to someone.
I had an imaginary one… and I thought I was really good at it 😉
I was and still am amazing on my air drums.
My old man bought me a Bert Weedon 101(?) in the 70’s. (Desperately uncool)
I didn’t bother to learn to play it, just posed with it at parties. (I never twigged it was uncool)
Swapped it for a fishing rod.
Evidently it’s worth a small fortune now.
Dunno about old guitars, but if I had to replace my 35 year old Sage fly rod now I’ll need > $1,200 USD.
(But with the price of fresh fish these days, that could almost be justified 🙁 )
That’s an alpaca, not a llama.
Oh dear, this again? I don’t really care, most people don’t really care, nobody actually cares anymore. These idiots have been screaming: “we’re all going to burn” for so long and in so many different ways that they are being tuned out. They might agonise to each other about getting the message out but, in reality, nobody cares about the message – we’ve all got Doom Fatigue (I’m trademarking that one for later). Even Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have to be paid to do their performance art these days – the time has long gone when activists would turn out in their thousands at the merest whisper of a climate march. Time to give it up, knock it on the head, exit stage left and vanish into the mists of time – people just don’t give a monkey’s any more.
But Richard, be reasonable. We must have tipping points! Mysterious unpredictable ominous tipping points! Nobody really wets the bed over slightly nicer weather anymore.
Doom loops – brilliant innit? Not even a hint of what bogeyman is lurking around the next corner, but it will be terrifying let me tell you.
Doom Fatigue™
Just copy and paste. You are welcome.
Better is Doom Bar*. Which reminds me – must get some more in.
Sharps Doom Bar bitter, from Rock, Cornwall.
Good choice. Bathom’s from Birmingham and Town Crier from Shropshire are also excellent. Reading Mr’s comment above re fishing, I can see the attraction of spending a fortune on a rod that will dangle there all afternoon while the happy fisher.. will down a few welcome thirst quenching ales.
Bring on the Doom see you at the Bar….
Any scientific paper that relies more than 25% on models should not be published.
Or hung up next to the toilet for the only suitable use.
Indeed. It’s been said many times here, but it still true: models run by unscrupulous persons can give any result desired. Even when run by honest people, they need to be tested against reality before they get any air time.
No scientist should be given access to a computer spreadsheet until they have spent 30 years mastering an abacus.
Yep. Instead of 30 years master-a-bating.
Hmmm.. as groups like the IPCC, JSO, XR and their ilk want to abate everything that makes life tolerable, maybe we should henceforth refer to them as “the master-abaters”..?
Ah, the geniuses that are Messrs Stewart, Creme,Gouldman and Godley – “..all mass debating my women…”
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!
OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way, doesn’t that mean we are all mortal? (Except maybe for Barack Obama).
These proclamations are getting funnier and funnier every year. Shouldn’t we be in the fourth or fifth “doom loop” by now?
The Extinction Clock tells it all
Studied particle physics, and ended up as a journalist.
What does that tell you about him..
On par with a barista, except a barista does something useful.
What new hallucinogenic recreational drugs are doing the circuits in the UK ??
ps.. is he using an old copy of “Sim City” perhaps ?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer, was a brilliant man – extremely intelligent, and yet he was fooled by the fairy hoax. Sometimes it’s the intelligent people that are the easiest to con – give them something they want to believe in, some confirmation bias, and their own intelligence works on filling in the blanks.
Exactly.
It does make you wonder what kind of nutjob _wants_ to believe in doom and destruction though…
There are quite a few misanthrope’s around. Odd sort of people.
I nominate Cooper for a high position in The Dead Earth Society.
Headline begins, “Save the Drama for Your Llama”…
But I don’t have a llama. Waaah!
Regards,
Bob
Your life will be calma
Without a llama’s drama.
The latest doom loop turned the Llama into a sheep.
But I don’t have a llama.
Then there is nothing to be a’Llama’d about, is there.
Alas, alack, I lack a llama.
Well, don’t Dalai then,
You win.
Call a whaaammbulance!
♪♫ I’m gonna ride my llama
From Peru to Texarkana ♪♫
It’ll go to the knacker,
Cos your Llama’s an Alpaca.
♪♫ If yo’ Mama was a llama yo’ probly like OBama♪♫
2038 is quite apt for The Apocalypse – in theory it will occur at 03:14:07 UTC on the 9th of January. https://theyear2038problem.com/
In theory – in practice, no UNIX based system from this century still used signed 32-bit dates, and even int hasn’t been 32 bit for decades if programs use int instead of the correct time_t.
It’s always 15 years in the future.
Isn’t that commercial fusion?
Greenland ice sheet collapse ‘soon’ is but one of several vaunted alarmist tropes that are literally impossible.
Greenland is geologically mostly bowl shaped from central sheet dome ice mass compression, with a few ‘bowl rim’ cracks enabling sea facing glaciers flowing outside the rim. (One of which sloughed icebergs that sunk the Titanic before there was any anthropogenic global warming.)
Greenland’s ice sheet would have to mostly melt away. And at current estimated rates, that would take more than 14000-20,000 years. (See essay Tipping Points in ebook Blowing Smoke for a visualization of Greenland bowl rock topology and the melt duration calculations. Remember, Greenland ice sheet peak is above melt for at most 3-4 months/year, and recharging severe Arctic cold for the rest.
Same reason Arctic summer sea ice never disappeared as predicted by Wadhams and Gore.)
By which melt time the world will probably be back deep into the next ice age. So won’t ever happen.
Which is why the Greenland ice sheet did not come close to disappearing during the last interglacial (Eemian), despite Greenland ice cores suggesting the Eemian peak warmth in Greenland was about 6-8C warmer than now based on 16O/18O water isotope ratios.
(For tech newbies here, the lighter water O isotope (in ice core ice from snow from sea water evaporation) evaporates more easily (less energy needed ==>lower temperature)—generally accepted in the paleoproxy community as basic physics, unlike Mann treemometers. And to complete the ice core temperature proxy physics, heavy hydrogen ( deuterium) is sufficiently rare in seawater that its impact on water Isotope ratios can be ignored to two decimal places. So all ice core temp studies do, since they are only good to not even one decimal place be because of Weather.)
A
A ridiculous story from a ridiculously uninformed alarmist. Well spotted.
Since the asteroid Apophis will slam into the Earth in 2036 after a close miss in 2029, we won’t need to worry about 2038. If you do not think this is going to happen, tweak your models a little more until you get it right.
I understood that during glaciations the planet has been drier due to so much water being locked up as ice, that seems common sense.
Conversely it seems logical that if the planet warms a couple of degrees C the planet ought to get wetter and current arid regions would shrink.
A drier Amazon Basin at the same time as a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is self-contradictory.
He missed the 2038 Unix/Linux clock overflow disaster.
I don’t think any version of Linux is susceptible, because time_t was defined as long rather than int right from the start.
The 2038 overflow was known when I was at Uni, well before Linus Torvalds started writing his own version of Minix.
Some of the early BSD versions might be susceptible, along with AT&T and some of the early commercial derivatives.
I don’t know if the Linux vulnerability has been fixed yet, but I know they have been working on it.
That makes it a more valid concern that global warming, which has never been a valid concern.
It appears that all 64-bit builds have an 8 byte time_t, but it might be a bit hit and miss for 32-bit.
Is anything 32-bit still in use? They’d be getting pretty long in the tooth by now.
Llama fiber is perfect for high quality “ sustainable “outer wear. It is the perfect clothing for those who play and work in the outdoors, which will be the same temperature as the indoors in the near future.
Alpaca fleece is finer.
Easier to put into a suitcase, too. 😉
Vicuna is supposed to be even better and more highly prized. Probably because they were never really domesticated.
Vicuna can cause serious damage. Just ask Sherman Adams during the Eisenhower administration.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1986/10/28/The-vicuna-coat-scandal/8506530859600/
Wasn’t it just last week that King Chuck and Ghengis gave us 6 years and change until the end of days? Now we’ve got 15 years? Did Thanos grant us a reprieve? It’s not easy to plan for the apocalypse if they can’t fix a date. And what if it’s raining? Will Armageddon be held indoors?
Excuse me, it was six years and 24 days. I was worried until that extra 24 days was mentioned. I thought it might have been just a wild guess, but that precision convinced me.
I have put a marker in my diary so I can celebrate still being here inn six years and 25 days, if I am spared that is…..
I suspect that in 6 years and 24 days, William will be on the throne: it’s a countdown to the end of Charlie’s reign.
What a nonsensical claim!
There is no proven link between burning fossil fuels and climate change, let alone a “well-established link”!
CO₂ is a very weak GHG with absorption and emission occurring in a very few very low energy far infrared wavelengths!
CO₂ is such a miniscule part of our atmosphere that it is measured in ‘part per million’ instead of whole number percentages.
As the UN, UNFCC and IPCC have repeatedly noted, the demonization of CO₂ and climate change fraud are solely to redistribute Global wealth.
That is, to force Western Republics and Democracies into tyrannical communist governments.
what relief – a few years ago AOC said we only had 12 years to go before the end of the earth – I feel so much better – and wrt Artic ice I wish the moodelers would explain how going from say -32 degrees to -30 degrees melts the entire Artic ice
I remember DO loops from Fortran. I always hated making a typo on a punch card and missing a parentheses. An endless DO loop. So now we have DOOM loops instead of Do loops.
OMG – I can remember those errors while doing punch cards. Mention that along with a rotary phone and all you get are blank stares
I have always had a heck of a time catching those rotary phones. I kept going around in circles.
From the article: “unlike the well-established link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change,”
Completely untrue. There has never been a link established between CO2 and climate change.
This author is either clueless, or he is lying to us.
Or both.
I’d say he’s lying and clueless.
With regard to the following: the Amazon rainforest could reach a tipping point that will transform it into a savannah by 2100.
Rather ironic that that would more likely happen if we stop burning fossil fuels, as the resultant decline of atmospheric carbon dioxide would start heading towards starvation levels for plant life again, as was happening before the industrial revolution.