Atlantic Ocean's Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Our climate has been extremely stable for a long time and I'm not expert but it is my understanding that chaotic systems can suddenly flip from stable to extremely unstable.
I think there will be a time, hopefully a long time away but possibly close, when the world realises that there' going to be disaster on an unprecedented scale and we all have reason to be very, very concerned.
If the entire Antarctic eastern shelf melts, there is enough ice there to raise sea levels by more than 70 meters. Some say this is 100 years away.... but ice doesn't melt all at once. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes alot sooner and what that world/civilization looks like I cannot imagine.
And if you have children, then 100 years away sounds very very soon because you know this is the world they will live in.
What are you going to do about it? Armed revolution? Hoard enough food to ensure that you survive a few months longer than the rest of humanity?
Of course I have no idea what to do because why the heck would you think about that unless you were an actual doomsday prepper?
Likely outcomes at that stage is gigantic food crisis and the catastrophe that would follow so you'd need to store quite alot of bags of rice to get through that.
This is my thinking too. Not just for you though, you need to be able to feed a self sustaining community (probably 100 or more people). Considered also taking some technological stores too. Water tech, refined metal stocks, manual and lower tech power tools. Maybe even some spare solar panels, inverters, battery electrolytes.
Though I haven't thought deeply enough to actually work out any timescales for the size of stocks required. Picking the right climate is probably the most important part though. Even if there is great change, some places are still going to be more arable than others, and surely that is at least partially predictable.
May I suggest taking up a lifestyle at this time and more or less in the place you are - assuming you're not in some jam-packed city where all hope is lost the moment society does break down for some time (New Orleans during Katarina is a good example of what will happen)? If you do live in such a place and will not consider to move out of it this won't work but if you have some space around you which you can call your own it makes sense to start using it in a productive way by growing something useful.
Dig a well if you can, a dug well is more reliable than a deep-drilled one as you can get water when the power fails (which it does quite often where I live out in the Swedish countryside thanks to storms or careless snow plough drivers and such).
If you don't live in a forested area you can start planting trees on less productive or hard to till soil, you'll need between 2 and 4 hectares to keep a house with around 200m2 of living area warmed to today's standards, less if you make the wise decision to lower them a bit. This does assume you have a wood-burning stove and cooking stove, of course - get those and use them regularly. Plant some fruit trees, berry bushes, a plot of potatoes (which you'll have to move around year after year as you should not grow potatoes in soil which carried them the year before or the one before that), root vegetables, easy stuff. For fun and profit you can add hops which will allow you to brew beer if you can get hold of barley - you could grow it yourself but it takes a lot of land and is a lot of work if you do everything by hand. Just make sure to think in practical terms, you're not trying to relive some Swiss Family Robinson fantasy but trying to live in a way which makes you and yours less dependent on the intricate workings of society, irrespective of whether any doomsday-scenario ever comes to pass or not. The less dependent you are of the trappings of 'modern' live, the less you'll suffer for the loss of such.
I saved the best bit for the end: you'll most likely be happier in the here and now by becoming more self-reliant and less dependent on 'modern' society and its... lures. That does not mean you have to become a Luddite or back-to-the-land hippy, it just means you won't feel lost by not being part of the herd which follows the latest craze, sports the latest gizmos and relishes in the latest fad. It also means you won't need to think about 'prepping' anymore, just like people who cycle to work won't need to think about going to the gym to get some exercise as they made it part of their normal life.
I hear what you're saying; However, it's mostly pointless. Climate change will eat up survivalists and off the grid types just like everyone else. What will you do when antibiotics are no longer available or your crops fail due to fire or drought (more likely now)?
Not really hating on your approach or comment, I just think people would be better off writing their senate representatives about addressing climate change or attending a peaceful rally rather than hedging their bets on going bush to survive the apocalypse.
I find i fascinating that I produce the best tasting peas in my garden, and it all originated from a small pea my son got from school. If I give a single pea to a modern person in the city, they most likely wouldn't have any idea of what to do with it.
Unfortunately, most people do live in cities where this is just out of the question. I also live in a city where arable land nearby is only borderline arable. Exactly the kind of place which is most exposed to most kinds of climate variability.
It sounds cliche, but in order to hunt a tahr, you have to think like a tahr. Once you learn their habits they're fairly easy to find and easy enough to shoot.
There's really big numbers up some of the valleys too. I've seen mobs of up to 30 before, and they just tend to stand there like idiots while you're shooting at them.
And hopefully one that doesn't rely on external inputs, and has a water supply that's not affected by climate change.
Learning how to farm it is essentially equivalent to currently farming it, or if not, then you need a few years of supplies to make it over the startup transient. With no reliable external input.
Push comes to shove, the only law will be "might makes right", so the only way to prepare for the worst is to be able to defend your assets. Being someone or friends with someone who has access to advanced weapons seems like a minimum requirement, but most important is to have a very wide social network with valuable skills to fall back on and start trading with.
Optimal average temperature for rice growing is 23-26C [0]. Current annual average temperature in, say, Japan is 16C.
A remote place with access to water and fertile soil, a lot of weapons and you're all set.
I know I'd be in trouble.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/rice-grown-in-...
You don't need to be a doomsday prepper to be prepared. And you don't need a complete collapse of society for things to get uncomfortable for you.
You should have at least 3 days of food and water, as well as other essential supplies (blankets, first aid kit, radio) in a bag or convenient location, ready to go in an emergency.
During the “great storm” we had in London where we had like maybe 5” of snow fall and everything stopped working I had people seriously complaining and telling war stories about going hungry because they couldn’t get food delivered...
Like seriously any small scale natural disaster or even a local utilities outage can cause issues to so many unprepared people it’s not even funny.
I keep some basic canned / dry food enough for about a week for 2 people, 20 liters of bottled water and several high capacity charged chargers and I live in W2 London.
I believe that they're discouraged because they tend to do more harm than good when applying a gauze and pressure is sufficient. People tend to go overkill.
However, there are situations where they save lives. This is why simply having first aid supplies isn't sufficient, but actually knowing what to do is essential as well.
Things to consider:
- Disruptions to communications.
- Disruptions in emergency police/fire/ems response
- Gasoline and diesel gone in 24 hours (or worse... I was on a coastal island where a hurricane suddenly turned -- all gas was sold within 6 hours of the hurricane warning!)
- Electricity disruption
- Mass transit shutdown
- Shutdown this of highways and other roads.
Basically, there’s a 72 hour “oh shit” phase (priority: your safety), 4-10 days of the new normal formulating (priority: protect your property), and then the new normal (deal with consequences, if any).
How to prepare depends on risk. If you live in a floodplain or on the coast, you should have a clue about how you’re going to need to think about a couple of weeks post flood or hurricane. In other places, it’s probably good to think about what to do when a snowstorm knocks out power for a week.
https://deepgreenresistance.org/images/decisive-ecological-w...
Nor the many other gigantic crises that face the earth such as plastic pollution.
As there is no way the people of earth will unify to fix this, better start getting ready sometime in the next 20 years for a gigantic shift in where people see civilization is headed.
There’s no escape for you or your family, except averting disaster in the first place, or death. Unless your prepping amounts to a suicide pact, then it’s just a fantasy to keep you from being too afraid. As comforting fantasies go, prepping seems like a particularly expensive and time-consuming one. Unless you’re desperate for the illusion of control, your time and money is better spent elsewhere.
I we're running from a lion I don't have to be faster than the lion, just faster than you.
I lock my doors for the same reason. My lock won't keep out someone determined to get in but they'll dissuade a casual opportunist.
90% of us would be better classed as the gazelle in this analogy. Even the lions would be fighting each other for dominance.
> If you want a preview, study famous famines and sieges, like the siege of Stalingrad, and the Holodomor
Most hardcore preppers either live outside a city or plan to escape the city pretty quickly, so I don't know what Stalingrad is supposed to prove. Were their people with remote bunkers and years of food supplies when holodomor happened?
Won't you worry they'll knock you off in the night so there's one fewer person to share with?
But you are right that if you prepare too well. So well that it's visible, it is likely that it will be taken from you. Or you can end up as that guy who prepared for zombie apocalypse and lost it all (100k USD invested) in hurricane.
It will never (with exception of all out nuclear war) be total world annihilation. Yet most people seems totally unprepared for stuff that just keeps happening. And it will likely be getting more frequent with climate change.
1. Status is relative, making $70k in rural Idaho enables a happier life than making $90k in San Jose.
2. In the post-apocalyptic world, many preppers will be relatively better off, having lots of practical skills like farming, mechanical know-how, survival skills, etc, vs professionals who thrive in a stable city but wouldn't last a month in the wilderness, can't hunt for food, start a fire, etc.
Therefore, the post-apocalyptic world becomes some sort of fantasy, where finally your skills are valued, and Joseph the lawyer will be begging you for help.
Disaster preparation is very much about community. A mistake or lack of luck can easily wipe out your "preparation." A disjointed community can eradicate it (and yeah, they'll spot your creepy 'grey man' shtick eventually). But a community could, and arguably should, prepare itself for possible disasters.
But what do I know, I just live in a place where if a levee breaks somewhere half the country will be taking boats to work.
Depends on your definition of "stable". We have no data on most aspects of the Earth's climate for most of human history. For example, we don't know what the frequency of storms was for any time period further back than a century or two (and the data is spotty further back than a few decades). What data we do have suggests that the 20th century was a period of unusual calm with respect to many aspects of climate, and that what we are seeing now is just a return to what has been normal for most of the period since the last Ice Age ended.
Even the findings presented in this article are limited: 1600 years sounds like a long time, but the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. What has the AMOC looked like during all that time? We don't know.
Really? This is quite a strong statement. What data and what aspects of climate are you thinking of? Presumably not temperature. World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C - I would hardly call that a "period of unusual calm".
For example, data suggesting that major storms were more frequent in the 19th century than the 20th.
> World temperatures rose at a rate unprecedented for millennia during the 20th C
Only if you believe highly dubious temperature reconstructions, including their claims to be accurate to within fractions of a degree.
I do believe them because many sources from different proxies agree on the temperature record, the science is very well developed and a strong consensus across a very large majority of experts and separate disciplines has been achieved.
"Highly dubious" is how I would describe the fringe criticisms of this work.
Not for the recent period where we have actual accurate temperature data to compare to. Some proxies show warming for that recent period (but not quite the same as the actual temperature data), others (such as the "hockey stick" reconstructions) actually show cooling. The fact that they agree better where there is no actual temperature data to compare them do does not fix this problem.
> a strong consensus
Consensus means nothing in science. Science works by making accurate predictions. Climate science cannot make accurate predictions of future climate. Even the IPCC admitted this (finally) in the AR5 (and then proceeded to obfuscate it by basing its conclusions on "expert judgment" instead).
All that you say is true, but:
Warming sea water due to decreased salinity and infractions through the circumpolar current result in increased precipitation, which as you say results in an increase in volume of land ice - however this volume is accruing inland, while the coastal feet of glaciers and ice shelves continue to be undercut by said warmer water, which then allows their collapse, which allows increased flow, which allows retreat. Now - the worrying possibility which arises is that the combination of more on shore mass and less off/near shore buttressing will result in a net increase in flow, which will then contribute further to the positive feedback loop.
Honestly, nobody knows, our models are nowhere near granular enough. I prefer to err on the side of caution, and take a pessimistic view, but that’s just me.
What historical record are you talking about?
> Personally, I’m trusting what the data shows happened last time the atmosphere had this much carbon in it over what our models show.
What data are you talking about?
Without the impulse, no response. However, it is the response that drives the nature of the dynamics.
I've recently paid attention to this phenomenon, and believe the concept can be adapted also to human phenomena.
As heads-of-state Trump and Putin have misunderstood each other's communications for some time, it is only natural that they are distrustful.
Each one expects the words of the other to lead to a response they can understand.
I decided that I am certain enough to model a solution to the armed conflict in Syria on my blog. The analysis is based on my understanding of graph theory and studies of the nation state stakeholders in the conflict.
https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/10/a-suggestion-for-r...
https://blog.henrikscorner.net/2018/04/11/syria-analysis-bor...
Consider this: Any organization is a system of people in roles, let's call them members. The members are expected to make decisions in accordance with their responsibilities. All decisions rest on the available information. The human mind is imperfect, including limitations in memory, and an emotional context for the information.
So, an organization is typically a tree of people making decisions, which together form a system.
A number of these systems are operating on and near Syrian territory. The dynamics may best be described as utter chaos.
Furthermore, I don't believe there has been any instance in the history of mankind where a rocket has performed a successful investigation of crimes.
It's well worth the karma hit if this may trigger someone to come up with better ideas than more rockets.
You can't estimate future melt rate based on just past melt rate and drawing a line.
It's more like taking away bricks from a building and having a sudden collapse.
Does the temperature slowly converge to room temperature, in a linear fashion? Not at all. That isn't how phase shift works. The soda in the glass will remain at the same temperature for as long as there is still ice. If you got a heat lamp and put it right next to the glass, you would increase the speed at which the ice cubes are melting, but you would not raise the temperature of the soda. It's only when the ice is almost gone that the temperature rises. And then it rises a lot.
Likewise, global warming is limited so long as we still have ice caps to melt. But once those ice caps are almost gone, the temperature increase will be unrestrained.
No, it won't. Even after all the ice is melted, the heat capacity of the Earth's oceans is huge. Plus your "heat lamp" analogy is a very poor one, the changes in radiative forcing at the top of the Earth's atmosphere are tiny compared to the total heat coming in from the Sun.
A hacker's guide to Climate Change - What do we know and how do we know it? An introduction to the basics of climate research and what we can do about climate change https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9184-a_hacker_s_guide_to_climate...
Simulating the future of the global agro-food system. Cybernetic models analyze scenarios of interactions between future global food consumption, agriculture, landuse, and the biogeochemical cycles of water, nitrogen and carbon. https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8935-simulating_the_future_of_th...
It's always difficult reading climate analysis like these articles where it bounces back and forth between sounding confident of projections in the first half of the article, to how it's all still really speculative without consensus and needing better modeling in the latter half.
All I want is to know what the data says and a reasonable estimate of it's probability of being true. Yet it's almost impossible to separate what the scientists hope the data may to point to and what it reasonably does in it's current state.
I guess, as a casual reader, it'd be better to not jump on every new study that comes out and wait for future consensus to form.
Some more information on the period here: http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/arch/examples.shtml
It seems possible that that local climate can change a lot more wildly then the global averages.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
The earlier intro section there lays out the discovery and some types of evidence that led to the conclusion, and a theory based on geology from China that these rapid changes tend to accompany deglaciation.
20 degrees Fahrenheit shift within a decade, even if just for one continent... It's hard to fathom.
So the weakening current started before the industrial revolution could have had an effect and well before any significant human caused CO2 and therefore was not caused by man.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/greenhouse...
I don't think your link supports the statement "the weaking started well before the industrial revolution."
Traditionally, the circulating water gets colder as it reaches the arctic circle and submerges, since cold water has a higher density than warmer water.
But: melting ice in the arctic releases freshwater. This reduces the salinity at the surface of the Northern Atlantic. Water with lower salinity is lighter. Therefore, this water no longer submerges, and the circulation is slowed down.
Indications of the process having started (edited) before humans could be responsible for it (few hundred years ago).
There must be some quantity of salt we can dump a year to raise salinity. We should be rigorous, and find out what that quantity is. If we can change a climate, we can change an ocean.
Yes, we probably can re-salinate a flow to attempt to alter its dynamics. We'd also have altered its salinity profile in ways which have repercussions on e.g. cod fisheries, or krill, or other things. Thats the problem with complex biological systems with lots of interrelated parts: they don't reverse with simple tweaks because once you change one part, you change lots of parts in unexpected ways.
(I did once study this stuff back in the 80s and was very bad at it, but what I recall of even two-actor predator-prey relationships is that they are remarkably complex, cyclical, and do not just return to the same stable place if you alter them trivially. I believe this is probably even more true for physical systems like weather and climate)
So, to raise salinity by .01%, we'd need 1268 years of normal production (plus some when you exclude sea-water extraction).
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(volume+of+the+world%27...
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=31956+cubic+miles+of+sa...
[2] http://www.saltinstitute.org/salt-101/production-industry/
Approximate salt content of the Atlantic Ocean: 11,000,000 billion metric tons
It was whether we can produce enough to bring the fresh water that is being added from melting ice up to normal Atlantic salinity.
If we’re going to hasten our demise, we might as well try sulfate aerosols or something with a more global effect. We’d still end up killing ourselves, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so much like trying to get a sailboat to move by blowing on the sails.