Climate change: Six tipping points ‘likely’ to be crossed
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> The six tipping points "likely" to be crossed, according to the research, published in Science, are:
- Greenland Ice Sheet collapse
- West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse
- Collapse of ocean circulation in the polar region of the North Atlantic
- Coral reef die off in the low latitudes
- Sudden thawing of permafrost in the Northern regions
- Abrupt sea ice loss in the Barents Sea.
The Science research article:
Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950
It seems like I was reading a lot of articles about the Permafrost in Siberia hitting temperature records as well as suffering from massive wildfires. Now it seems like there is less news from that region.
The news industry is a business like any other. Journalists don't stop reporting on things when the things stop happening; they stop reporting when they feel the reports aren't driving engagement with the audience, eg revenue.
There is only a loose correlation between what's happening in the world and what's being reported in newspapers and journals when it comes to long term trends.
What is novel and salient is only a tiny fraction of what is relevant to come to an informed opinion. That’s why news is set up for failure if its role is seen as informing the public. I see more potential for documentaries when it comes to informing the public, but the news controversies around past climate documentaries have made the category somewhat burnt.
Also when something is getting worse at the same rate it was getting worse previously, engagement drops in favour of stories where change is new or accelerating: over the last while has been Covid then Ukraine then inflation all blowing up surprisingly and rapidly while the permafrost situation is quietly getting worse as expected.
If you are in the UK right now you'd be forgiven for asking “whatever happened to news about inflation and Ukraine” because they fell off the news cycle for a while unless you took efforts to look beyond the daily headlines & front-pages, as they were progressing just as bad as before but something else (the health of ol' Liz and related constitutional matters) had a sudden bump in its rate of change. Even the 9/11 anniversary didn't get a look-in.
Ukraine is creeping back into the news cycle, as monarch related matters are settling into their final pattern (everyone who needs/wants to know has a clue how the next week or few are going to pan out in that regard) but there has been a sudden change in the Ukraine/Russia situation in the form of the recent surprise counter offensive (surprise both in that such an effort was not sign-posted, for the obvious reason that being unexpected was part of the plan, and in how effectively it has worked).
>7 times less area was affected by forest fires in the region this year compared to 2021. This is inside scoop but you can easily verify it by checking particulates/CO data using nullschool's earth. Last year smoke covered area the size of Oregon or something and persisted for weeks.
"There had been very few fires" is just not catchy news, who would like or comment?
Permafrost thawing is a separate issue but may be a bit harder to obtain realtime data until buildings crumble
Does this mean Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia will get really cold? We depend critically on the Gulf Stream...
Depending on how fast the artic ice cap melt, we could see the average temperature over a year in western europe drop, while increasing over the summer months.
But climate is weird, that's why the less we perturb it, the better we get.
I think you might be able to find NASA maps and compare the average temperature in 1991 and today, you'll have your response.
Sorry if i can't be more helpful.
At the world level, the richest 1% is producing double of the poorest 50%.
We should not talk about the increase coming from other countries, we should already start with us reducing our impact and adapt. The problem is that we all have/find good excuses not to change our behavior.
we are talking about people who swim next to corpses in the ganges river.
[China and India CO2 impact is less than their population's share]
> because vast swaths of these countries live in extreme poverty, not because of environmental consciousness.
This injects a judgement that I think is irrelevant. The impact on the environment does not depend on the REASON. It depends only on the ACTION.
Frankly, with that lead in, I am surprised the above poster did not go on to say: "We should focus on preparing to survive a massive climate change." That was certainly my take-away from the argument.
Fossil carbon is not.
China and India have net zero goals, just like the USA.
What part of them are you worried about specifically?
https://www.unpri.org/pri-blog/the-net-zero-transition-in-ch...
The point of climate policy is not to stop global warming, in the sense of cooling the planet in an absolute sense. It's to slow it down, cooling it in a relative sense.
What you're describing sounds like the Clathrate gun hypothesis, which would be moderately terrifying: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis>
If it does happen it shifts man-made climate change from an unprecedented humanitarian disaster to a possible global extinction event. The last time it happened it may have wiped out 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates.
But, there are so many terrible consequences of climate change that are near certainties for us to waste valuable focus and mental energy being terrified of the merely hypothetical.
("The risk of climate tipping points is rising rapidly as the world heats up"/ "Estimated range of global heating needed to pass tipping point temperature").
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on...
(Based on the data in the study this story is referring to.)
Like getting shot is bad. If a scientific and economic consensus tells you to put on a Kevlar vest, you do it.
They shouldn't really need to detail all the other things that could go wrong if you get shot, because the conversation should already be over and you should have the vest on, which means even if you do get shot things will probably go better for you and you now have the mental energy to work towards not getting shot.
That's not to say there aren't 'tipping points' (you certainly can't prove they don't exist.)
What chance have they got about being right about the climate hysteria on a longer term?
Why will a longer term prediction be be more accurate? They have had less chances to go back and amend the models than the short term forecasters.
> If you don't have faith in science to get that right
That's the fundamental point, it's a faith based argument. I want some real world evidence that these absurd predictions are likely to be accurate. That won't happen as it's all based on "models" that have no history of being accurate.
Or can you dig out some of the ones you have found to be accurate? Here's one that wasn't: https://nypost.com/2020/01/10/the-telling-tale-of-glacier-na...
We’re still just hoping we stop polluting. It’s not happening fast enough.
Edit: Do we actually have any chance of using geoengineering to turn things around?
It keeps fossil fuel suppliers rich at the expense of everyone else though, so it's regularly suggested as a solution.
Ask them to pay for it though, and you'll get a different answer.
I’m imagining sulphates being something to do with it, but I really have no idea if this is practical etc.
Currently they say if we don't move to renewables, carbon fees etc. faster then we'll need to do some of this. But it would be cheaper to avoid it as much as we can:
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-4/
Their summary on solar-radiation-modification is:
> Uncertainties surrounding solar radiation modification (SRM) measures constrain their potential deployment. These uncertainties include: technological immaturity; limited physical understanding about their effectiveness to limit global warming; and a weak capacity to govern, legitimize, and scale such measures. Some recent model-based analysis suggests SRM would be effective but that it is too early to evaluate its feasibility. Even in the uncertain case that the most adverse side-effects of SRM can be avoided, public resistance, ethical concerns and potential impacts on sustainable development could render SRM economically, socially and institutionally undesirable (low agreement, medium evidence)
In a roundabout way they do. Back in the 70s-90s, sulphates were being pumped into the atmosphere in huge amounts due to fossil fuel combustion and other industrial processes. This was reacting with atmospheric water to produce hydrogen sulphate, otherwise known as sulphuric acid, which caused acid rain.
The fix was not some grand geoengineering scheme, rather it was to implement a cap and trade system, much like what has been proposed for CO2. The result is that SOx emissions dropped precipitously, thus acid rain in the United States is a thing of the past.
That's the real solution. To limit CO2 emissions. We know this, the world knows this, the people making money off the fossil fuel industry know this, the politicians they own know this. Yet here we are talking about spraying more shit into the air we breath because that's the easiest option that doesn't disrupt profit or inconvenience anyone.
Oh and if you're hoping for a political solution. 95% or so of Bangladesh lies in the Indus valley. You'll have to explain to 150 million people, first, that they'll all have to move and that they'll no longer have any political power at all, anywhere. The country will, essentially, die. Oh and the only places they can move are India, hostile to muslims and muslim immigration, and perhaps Myanmar, who let armies massacring and raping muslims run wild for a few years ...
Good luck convincing them not having global warming is a good idea. Once the issue moves toward criticality, Good luck convincing them not to start a war ... WITH global warming, it's ~70 years before the issue becomes critical, without, perhaps 15.
We need to take active control of the climate. It's not a choice, it's a necessity. One thing I find funny is that when you look at the issue globally, I think the best solution is, well definitely not cooling (and just as warming is totally unavoidable now, a cooling cycle will start perhaps as early as 2200. That will rapidly become a lot worse than global warming is now). Perhaps something like 0.5 degrees per century from this point forward. What we actually want is to slow and extend global warming for at least a few hundred more years.
Many proposed geoeningeering methods don't treat the problem but just mask the symptoms. For starters, CO2 heats the surface and the atmosphere, but solar radiation primarily heats the surface.
This means you cannot use a reduction in incoming sunlight to fully offset CO2 warming - if you get the surface temperature correct, the atmosphere is still warmer and so you get less rain. For many regions, a reduction on rain might be more important - we wouldn't want to end up killing the Amazon rainforest by accident!
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008JD01...
Have you got a reference for that claim? I hear it a lot and assume it's just made-up extremism, isn't it?
Do better please
Define flooding as California megaflood puts LA/Orange county underwater.
TL/DR, risk is now 2x historic and is expected to rise to 4-7x historic.
Historical: floods equal to or greater in magnitude to those in 1862 occur five to seven times per millennium [i.e., a 1.0 to 0.5% annual likelihood or 100- to 200-year recurrence interval (RI)]
... We find that climate change to date (as of 2022) has already increased the annual likelihood of an ARkHist event by ~105% relative to 1920 in the CESM1-LENS ensemble and of an even higher magnitude (200-year RI) event by ~234%. This finding is consistent with prior work reporting progressively larger increases in projected extreme precipitation events for increasing event magnitudes [e.g., (42)]. We further find that by ~2060, on a high emissions trajectory, the annual likelihood of an ARkHist level event increases by ~374% and by ~683% for a formerly 200-year RI event.
Just for kicks, what happens if the existing, current drought in the US (worst in 1200 years) continues and/or worsens over the next two years, cutting agricultural production and raising the cost of food (disclaimer: long CORN). https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
And if a megaflood wipes out California. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq0995
And a series of hurricanes causes extreme damage to the Eastern seaboard also shutting down Gulf refineries thus cutting oil/gas to the US https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/short-history-us-oil...
None of those on its own is a civ killer. The problem is when each of these goes from exceedingly rare to rather common.
And it isn't just the US, it is global.
It's incredible how widespread misinformation about climate change is. All these replies from people who support the OP's claim but have no idea why and are just taking random stabs at imagined reasons.
Geo-engineering could be done by changing the planet’s albedo, for example by seeding the upper atmosphere with certain chemicals, but on the one hand we don’t understand the earth’s climate system well enough to do this safely, and on the other hand it’s like having a foot on the gas and a foot on the brake at the same time, intuitively you can tell this isn’t a good solution.
The idea is that iron is the main limiting factor to algae growth, so that adding iron to currently barren areas in the oceans would allow algae growth on a very large scale.
The UK's "overshoot day" is in May. This is the point I try make to people who are sceptical about making personal decisions in their life to reduce consumption and demand because they feel other countries aren't pulling their weight.
It seems like everyone will point fingers right until collapse.
It's an interesting question as to whether the human race has collectively spent more time and energy trying to solve climate change or more time and energy pretending it wasn't happening.
As an example, take one decision to shut down all of Germany's nuclear power plants in absence of carbon neutral alternatives. In short term it benefited Russian regime and allowed it to conduct its barbaric war on Ukraine in full knowledge the most powerful country of EU is in their pocket. In long term destroying EU's industry serves Chinese interests.
You mean those things that most people now consider cheaper than both nuclear and fossil fuels despite the billions of dollars spent creating conspiracy theories to undermine them? By people with a vested interest in gas prices being high? Their absence seems more political than technical, an argument that is often used for nuclear.
Fossil fuel producers on the other hand really don't like those things.
China for example rolled out nuclear but also more wind, more solar, more EVs, more Hydro and so on. Seems like a sensible thing to do if you dont want to be beholden to fossil fuel suppliers.
China is going to collapse due to demographics and is one of the worst abusers of climate.
Their renewables are a joke, it's coal and gas and massive pollution.
Do not hold them up as a standard.
That is the model to follow, not a Malthusian 'run to the hills'.
This is no different.
These things might happen, but so does an astroid hitting earth in an hour.
That's not science. Science doesn't deal in probability but rather in explanations. And you can either explain exactly how it will happen or you can't.
The rest is catastrophizing.
Yes the climate is changing, yes it will have an impact. But there are currently no scientifically demonstrated (not just speculated) consequences of climate change, we don't know how to deal with.
> Science doesn't deal in probability but rather in explanations. And you can either explain exactly how it will happen or you can't.
Science absolutely does deal with probabilities. It's much easier to find correlations than causations, but even with causation, there are unknowns. In the case of the global climate, while we can say CO2 raises the global temperature, we don't know what specific temperature will break any specific system on lists like this, the best we can do is give a graph of probability against temperature; while the article linked to does not have such a graph, that says more about the BBC than about the actual science.
Today's your lucky day, you're one of the 10,000 who learn about quantum mechanics (fundamentally random) and chaos theory (sensitivity to initial conditions such that even classical mechanics might as well be fundamentally random) for the first time today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Edit:
Also, p-values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
Growth. Not actual GDP. Over the next 28 years that means if the world GDP expands 100%, so doubles, unchecked climate change will mean that is only 96%.
That is not the apocalyptic situation that is constantly in the media. The world won't die in a fireball. It's a problem, that needs to be dealt with, but we need to keep context. Covid and the Ukraine war have already had a worse impact on humans worldwide that climate change.
And there are a million other black swan events we could be afraid of that are just as likely as climate change, yet we don't care about them because it's not on the BBC. Supervolcanoes, asteroids, tsunamis, more deadly viruses, etc etc.
Edit: to be clear, that's not the only thing dubious about your comment. The IPCC does not study climate change but aggregates climate change studies. Asteroids are obviously less "likely" than climate change which shouldn't even be a category because climate change is already happening and already has a real impact. "The world won't die in a fireball" is a red herring, the world will be fine but people will be far worse off, especially poor substance farmers in sub-saharan Africa, who also – to come back to you original point – don't contribute a lot to global GDP but are still humans that matter and shouldn't starve to death.
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2021-08-11-bjorn-l...
A few extracts (I got the date wrong its 2100 not 2050):
Because of economic development, the UN estimates that the average person in the world will become 450 per cent as well-off by 2100 as they are today. But climate change will have a cost, in that adaptation and challenges become somewhat harder. Because of climate change, the average person in 2100 will “only” be 436 per cent as well off as today.
Also:
This matters, because globally, many more people die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million people die annually from heat, but 4.5 million people die from cold. As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year. This fits the narrative, of course, and is what we have heard over and over again.
You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.
But it turns out that because global warming has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths. You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
But his interpretation is dubious at best because the study is not about climate change! The reduction in deaths attributed to cold or heat might not be connected to climate change at all, the study doesn't say anything about it. That's solely the author's interpretation. From the actual study (which is also pure speculation because their method doesn't provide this causality): "The results indicate that global warming might slightly reduce the net temperature-related deaths, although, in the long run, climate change is expected to increase mortality burden."
He also doesn't provide a clear source for his claims on economic development, so I'm still sceptical.
https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/02/28/pr-wgii-ar6/
We talk about a world with more human losses, dry spills interrupting businesses. Spending much more money on rebuilding destroyed infrastructure.
The heat wave in Germany threatened plenty of critical water ways.
Mass live amount of animals just died.
Do you wanna live on an empty planet?
And we don't know yet how bad it can get.
Take a really bad long heat wave in a big city (we have a lot of them) and guess how many could just die in a mass city death event based on cascading issues like to hot for streets, no longer enough water etc.
My link references the IPCC directly.
And I have seen the German drought. I have seen animal death.
It's not a theoretically thing.
And at least from my side it changes fundamentally my surroundings. Germany was not a dry country before.
Don't worry we won't survive it.
Also, global GDP is $80,934,771,028,340[1]. So, if that doubles to 160 in 2050, that means that we’d burned $3,200,000,000,000[2] in vain in just 2050. That’s not chump change.
[1] In 2017, https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
[2] I think it’s correct: 4% * $80,934,771,028,340, and rounded
How many lives could be saved using 4% of global GDP?
How much would it cost to avert climate change? Several studies have shown that the cost to avoid the damage of climate change is much cheaper than dealing with the outcomes. If you think 4% is nothing to be concerned about, why don't we spend 4% of global GDP fixing the problem?