Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok

[n2doc]

By Fred Guterl | May 25, 2012


The eminent British scientist James Lovelock, back in the 1970s, formulated his theory of Gaia, which held that the Earth was a kind of super organism. It had a self-regulating quality that would keep everything within that narrow band that made life possible. If things got too warm or too cold—if sunlight varied, or volcanoes caused a fall in temperatures, and so forth—Gaia would eventually compensate. This was a comforting notion. It was also wrong, as Lovelock himself later concluded. "I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilization are in grave danger," he wrote in the Independent in 2006.

The world has warmed since those heady days of Gaia, and scientists have grown gloomier in their assessment of the state of the world's climate. NASA climate scientist James Hanson has warned of a "Venus effect," in which runaway warming turns Earth into an uninhabitable desert, with a surface temperature high enough to melt lead, sometime in the next few centuries. Even Hanson, though, is beginning to look downright optimistic compared to a new crop of climate scientists, who fret that things could head south as quickly as a handful of years, or even months, if we're particularly unlucky. Ironically, some of them are intellectual offspring of Lovelock, the original optimist gone sour.

The true gloomsters are scientists who look at climate through the lens of "dynamical systems," a mathematics that describes things that tend to change suddenly and are difficult to predict. It is the mathematics of the tipping point—the moment at which a "system" that has been changing slowly and predictably will suddenly "flip." The colloquial example is the straw that breaks that camel's back. Or you can also think of it as a ship that is stable until it tips too far in one direction and then capsizes. In this view, Earth's climate is, or could soon be, ready to capsize, causing sudden, perhaps catastrophic, changes. And once it capsizes, it could be next to impossible to right it again.


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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-worlds-weather-could-quickly-run-amok

[greytdemocrat]

1. I need more lead time...

Months aren't going to cut it, I can't sell my Facebook stock and enjoy the money that quick before I melt.

[coalition_unwilling]

9. I can only drink so many shots of Jose Cuervo per day. Huge problem, b/c I still

have a bunch of books I want to read before it's too late. Jose Cuervo or books? Hmm, talk about your Hobson's Choice

[Warpy]

2. Oh, I don't think we're quite that powerful.

I do think our technological society is going to have to change radically within the next hundred years or so. I doubt very much that we'd recognize the world in another two centuries.

How well we come through it is going to depend on not only how we handle climate change and the impending refugee situation caused by large scale famine, but how we come through the impending financial catastrophe.

We could be post Roman Europe or we could be simply a post imperial country with reduced standard of living but with essential structures in place.

It will be interesting to watch.

[n2doc]

3. 7 billion people make quite a mark n/t

[Speck Tater]

5. That's stage three.

Haldane's stages of acceptance of a theory: (paraphrased from memory)

1. This is nonsense. It can't be true.
2. This is interesting, but not widely accepted.
3. This is true, but the effect is too small to be concerned with.
4. Of course this is true. We've believed it all along.

I think the financial catastrophe will be irrelevant. When the population of the earth is reduced to 1/10th it's present number it will be a whole different world. I could be a toss-up whether that remaining 10% survives or not. But one thing is certain; even if the human race survives, what we call "civilization" will not.

[AverageJoe90]

8. Civilization isn't going to collapse.

Well, not everywhere, at least. However, though, there are indeed regions of the world that very well could suffer a Roman style collapse.....China and India come to mind rather easily, I think.

The truth is, the 'doom-and-gloom' scenarios have not only failed to wake a lot of people up but have actually had the effect of turning many people off to the reality(I should be honest........I was one of these poor dupes, once upon a time.), that anthropogenic climate change is indeed very real.

[FarCenter]

11. I think this is basically true -- the core will defend itself

Immigration and interanational travel will be shut down, and lots of populations will die in place from starvation, disease, etc.

The problem is war, especially biological war, which may cause extensive death of the populations of nations seen as the main perpetrators of the catastrophe.

Note that the Australians managed to kill upwards of 95% of the rabbits with biological agents on two separate occasions.

[AverageJoe90]

19. Well......

I hate to admit this but you may very well be right about biological warfare.

[Speck Tater]

12. You don't say this because you KNOW it to be true, but because you WANT it to be true.

It's only natural to believe what we want to believe.

Mother nature, however, doesn't really care what we believe. And it doesn't matter who wakes up and who doesn't. We can't change what the corporate governments don't want to change, and it's probably too late to save the species anyway.

[AverageJoe90]

17. Well, you do have a point.

....in that Nature can't be forced to go along with the whims of humanity.

Civilization is indeed in trouble but at this point a total Mad-Max style collapse isn't likely, not in most areas at least.
The one good thing is, is that humans are an extremely resilient & intelligent species compared to most others, even with our terrible flaws; chances are, we'll be here long after the primates, elephants, and most others. have gone extinct.
But that isn't the world I would want to live in, and that's why we need to keep pushing for results.

[AverageJoe90]

6. If we don't change things.......

then yes, things will indeed become very tragic for most of the world.

However, though, one of the main things we need to do is tune out the 'doom-and-gloom' theories and the people who push them. Unfortunately, that is one of the major reasons why some still aren't awake to the truth yet.

[Speck Tater]

13. People will only become interested in the problem...

...AFTER the inevitability of doom is so clear that it can no longer be denied, AND after that doom is DAYS or HOURS away (not years; people don't care about things that are years away), and by then it will be too late.

The reason people don't take it seriously is that there are NOT ENOUGH people screaming out the message of doom and gloom. That's why doom will catch them unaware.

[AverageJoe90]

18. That may be true in a few cases. But m

Notice how the global warming deniers have a far harder time rejecting the hard facts & data than to issue rebuttals to doom-and-gloom scenarios.

Pointing out that humanity could be in serious trouble in spots and that the planet might take some decades to recover if we don't act soon, isn't what I meant by 'doom and gloom'. It's a commonly accepted plausible outcome.

What I was talking about,was stuff like Earth turning into Venus, or extreme cascading/feedback scenarios that couldn't possibly apply in reality even in the absolute worst case scenarios. That is the stuff that the dishonest "Climate Change is a Hoax" clique likes to pounce on, and we can't make anymore mistakes like that. We can't afford to end up inadvertently dropping more ammo in their lap. So many people have already been scared off(or become completely hopeless, thanks to) by the 'doom-and-gloom' scenarios and I was one of those lucky few who managed to see thru that.

Only the continuation of the usage cold hard facts, backed up with logical scenarios can save us(and lessening the influence of oil money would help greatly as well!)

[AverageJoe90]

4. I'm sorry, but.....

Hanson is a bit of a quack...............and Lovelock was indeed correct back then. Earth DOES have the ability to heal itself over time.

The gloomsters are doing nothing but making us look like a bunch of 'Chicken Littles'. You ever wonder why the GW deniers have been so successful over the past decade or so? It's not just oil money and constant streams of propaganda. The gloom-and-doom people on OUR side have done a lot of damage as well.

It's time to start ignoring the 'Cascade effects' morons and instead start trying to find other spokesmen who can truly wake us up.

There isn't going to be Hanson-style runaway warming or sudden flips. Both of these are not only plain bullshit but they're scaring away a lot of people who would otherwise be open to the fact that global warming is indeed a serious issue.

Right now, 'doom-and-gloom' theories are the LAST f***ing thing we need.

[Speck Tater]

7. Are you right or wrong? It doesn't matter.

Mother nature votes last, and her votes trump all of ours put together.

So if you convince me of something that's not true, or I convince you of something that is true, either way it won't make any difference. What will happen, will happen, and we might just as well go right on listening to the music and rearranging the deck chairs when they slide too close to the guard rails.

For all the difference that you or I could possible make to the future of the planet, it doesn't matter one iota what we believe.

[CreekDog]

15. The Earth heals itself in geologic time, but our lives are not on that scale.

[AverageJoe90]

20. That could very well be true.

Which is why we need to continue spreading the word. Complacency will only harm us even further.

[FarCenter]

10. Quote from another site ----

"Always bet on the optimist in the short term and always bet on the pessimist long term. The optimist will be right until he is wrong, and the pessimist will be wrong up until the point where he is right."

Systems tend to be quasi-linear for perturbations, i.e. a small change in inputs will result in a small proportional change in outputs.

However, real systems are non-linear for large perturbations, i.e. a moderate change in inputs results in outputs which are essentially unpredictable.

[Speck Tater]

14. Every morning when you get up...

say to yourself "I will not die today."

In your entire life you will only be wrong once.

[solarman350]

16. Is Abrupt Climate Change Possible?

Well, no matter...I've already seen the movies about this, and I know how it ends. Nothing to see here. Move along....Now, let's get back to celebrating Memorial Day Weekend as if we REALLY and TRULY cared about memorializing "those that have fallen."

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's heart for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in the moment they were swept before the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal it's secrets by and by
By and by...
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal it's secrets by and by
By and by...
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

--Jackson Browne