Nine climate tipping points now 'active,' warn scientists

https://phys.org/news/2019-11-climate-scientists.html

by xdze2 • 7 years ago

85 85 7 years ago

ablation• 7 years ago

A thoroughly disheartening read, as from what we've seen so far, we seem incapable of taking any action, let alone "emergency action" to mitigate this.

m_fayer• 7 years ago

The only slightly less alarming source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0

martincollignon• 7 years ago

If you want to do something as a techie, I would suggest helping out projects like the ones found here: https://github.com/topics/climate-change I would also suggest joining communities like https://climateaction.tech/

xdze2• 7 years ago

I would like to add this article by Bret Victor: "What can a technologist do about climate change? (A personal view)" http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

layoric• 7 years ago

This piece by Brett Victor gave me the push to focus more on what work I do rather than just focusing on personal wealth + career. I ended up being employee #1 at solar forecasting company that is targeting the intermittency problem of renewables.

If you’re in a privileged enough situation, I’d highly recommend renewable energy sector, lots of problems where applying technical skill can be extremely impactful.

perfunctory3• 7 years ago

It took me a very long time (years) to come to terms with the idea that as a techie I can't do anything to help climate. Tech projects is just an excuse to stay in my comfort zone. A very uncomfortable realization.

aww_dang• 7 years ago

Everyone has power over their consumption choices.

spodek3• 7 years ago

Do you not think about living by your values as a matter of integrity?

I don't not steal to stop others from stealing. I don't steal because I don't want to hurt others. If everyone in the world stole, I still wouldn't. If the whole world pollutes, I'm still going to avoid polluting as much as I can.

leocassarani• 7 years ago

And if you're eligible to vote in the UK, vote Labour in the December 12th general election: https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/a-green-industrial-revolutio...

Likewise support Green New Deal politicians in the US and elsewhere.

rayiner8• 7 years ago

Likewise support Green New Deal politicians in the US and elsewhere.

If we are really trying to avert climate change, how is spending trillions on labor unions and guaranteed jobs going to help?

If this was the plot of the movie Armageddon, and there was an asteroid hurtling towards earth, would your planned respond spend pages talking about unions, wealth inequality, indigenous people, and guaranteed healthcare, jobs, and housing? If climate change is really imminent and existential threat that requires “war time mobilization” then how can we afford to water down our response with these tangential things?

Under the Green New Deal you’d spend trillions more a year on healthcare, housing, etc. For that money you could buy up the major oil companies like Exxon (market cap $300 billion) and keep the oil in the ground. You could make the US carbon neutral using existing or near-term CO2 recapture technology. You could bankroll India and China to keep their fossil fuels in the ground and build out fully renewable capacity. You could invest in renewables technology, nuclear, carbon capture at the same time. If you sincerely believed that climate change was an existential crisis, why would you divert 90%+ of the force of the “war time mobilization” on social programs?

In my view, the Green new deal has done incalculable damage to the environmental movement. It is a transparent and cynical attempt to piggy-back traditional left wing politics onto the environmental movement, undermining its credibility and seriousness.

tonyedgecombe• 7 years ago

The unions aren't going to let Labour do anything serious about climate change.

The idea of green growth is probably false: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...

LessDmesg2• 7 years ago

Human civilizations have always blossomed in warmer climate. All this scaremongering about global warming ending human civilization and destroying nature is just laughable.

softwarelimits2• 7 years ago

May I humbly ask:

What are your qualifications that enable you to come to this conclusion?

I would be very interested in studying your publications - where can I find your analysis?

Also it would be really very appreciated if you would like to publish the datasets that lead you to this conclusion - would you like to give us a public repo with the data, so we can check your results?

Thank you very much!

ppf13• 7 years ago

That's not very humble. His assertions are quite basic, and don't need research-grade qualifications to consider. The earth has certainly prehistorically been much warmer, so nature handled it just fine, and it is an interesting question to consider how much more arable land a warmer earth would have.

wayoutthere3• 7 years ago

The sociological impact will be immense and likely bankrupt most of the world. We're going to have to move people out of low-lying areas in a pretty short amount of time. There will be billions of refugees but the inland areas don't have the infrastructure or water sources to absorb that many people. There will be food shortages as farmable land becomes inundated or dries up. Wars will happen as desperate people / nations fight over limited resources.

Every coastal city is under threat, and east Asia (where half the world's population lives) is especially vulnerable. I have a feeling things are going to get really, really bad in about 20 years because there's no realistic plan to do anything about it.

LessDmesg2• 7 years ago

Sounds like fearmongering with no basis. There are lots of areas which would benefit from warming and become food producers (Siberia and Canada come to mind). As for Southeast Asians: they're already used to living on water, with stilt houses, rice terraces etc. Humans can cope, as tgey always have. Overall, there will be more water, more warmth and more civilization.

travisoneill1• 7 years ago

It seems like they are always saying we are on the brink of some "tipping point." Is there an example of any we have already passed?

ElonMuskrat• 7 years ago

Pretty hard to take climate change reporting seriously.

The media is an amplifier that only publishes the most alarmist scientific findings, always blanketed in paragraphs of the editors own apocalyptic interpretation.

Climate science is complex. There's a broad spectrum of findings, many are not world-ending, and sometimes disagree on the details.

wayoutthere3• 7 years ago

If anything, the media understates the threat by mixing in a lot of debunked misinformation. It's hard to take most journalism seriously with the sensationalism bias, but we're already seeing serious negative effects from climate change in the most vulnerable countries.

The planet will be a very different place in 50 years.

goodcanadian2• 7 years ago

That is the whole point of the article. It lists NINE that the authors believe we have already passed.

gus_massa• 7 years ago

No. The list has nine tipping points that the authors are afraid we will pass in the future. From the article:

Nine active tipping points:
[...]
The rainforests, permafrost and boreal forests are examples of biosphere tipping points that if crossed result in the release of additional greenhouse gases amplifying warming.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

It's difficult to appreciate or convey the timescales involved here.

Human activities are pushing atmospheric CO2 concentrations to levels not seen for millions of years.

We've accomplished that in a scant 200 years of fossil fuel use, though with consumption doubling about every 30-40 years, half of the total has occurred since the 1970s.

Atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels will remain elevated for many thousands of years.

The first awareness of a possible problem seems to have been in the 1850s (yes, the 19th century), and by the early 20th century, the US Naval Research Laboratory was warning of possibly impacts on civilisation. Comprehensive and consistent measurements didn't begin until the 1950s (Charles Keeling and his eponymous curve), and political efforts to address the challenge began in the 1960s. They've been less successful than early activists forecast.

The impacts of climate change not only develop slowly and over time, but through emergent and second-order effects, the full impacts aren't directly forseable. We know that temperatures on average will rise, as will sea levels. Local climactic effects may be above or below those averages. Direct changes include not only temperature but chemistry, and induced effects on ecosystems and human activities, including agriculture and disease. We're seeing long-term trends already in terms of temperatures, sea level rise, shifting climactic zones, changes to forest health, and more. Those are just the harbinger of what will all but certainly be vastly greater consequences playing out over coming decades and centuries.

If it helps: you're in the middle of a train wreck, as a bridge collapses, and the cars hurtle into a fuel storage dump, but are witnessing all of this in super slow motion. What looks like nothing happening is in fact things happening, and most especially approaching critical points at which either it's not possible to roll back to the previous state, much as a block tipped too far doesn't fall back, but continues over, or where behaviour changes dramatically, as the difference between tapping a windowpane and driving your fist through it. Nonlinear responses mean you cannot predict future states based on a steady extrapolation from past experience.

You are in the middle of the emergency -- the emergent situation. The brink lasts a long time, at human scales. On geological ones, this is the blink of an eye, or less.

xienze• 7 years ago

It seems like they are always saying we are on the brink of some "tipping point."

Of course, as soon as someone says “that’s it, science has concluded we’re all fucked” no one will see the value in the various money-shifting schemes that have been proposed to save the earth.

spodek3• 7 years ago

Is there an example of any we have already passed?

Reading about nature before humans or where humans settle shows that what passes as nature today is nothing like it used to be. That we are mostly ignorant of it doesn't change that we've passed many tipping points. Each extinction, for example, is irreversible and everyone here knows we're causing more than ever.

I recommend The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (audiobook free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8z6vsg1OH8) and The Once and Future World by J. B. MacKinnon http://www.jbmackinnon.com/index.html. I recorded a video essay on Once and Future World: http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-....

We've crossed tipping point after tipping point. We just don't know what we've lost.

perfunctory3• 7 years ago

The scariest thing about climate change is not climate deniers. The scariest thing is people who believe in climate emergency and sit on their butt and do nothing.

spodek3• 7 years ago

I challenged myself to avoid flying for a year, anticipating a year of missing out, losing money, missing family, and all sorts of deprivation and sacrifice. Within a few months I found it one of my best decisions so kept going. I'm now over 4.5 years and may never fly again.

But when I talk to people about not flying, or avoiding packaged food, they tell me it's impossible.

It's not only possible, it will improve your life as much as dropping sugar or any other addiction. Nobody gets it. They think I'm suffering or privileged when it's the opposite. I explain more in my second TEDx talk http://joshuaspodek.com/my-second-tedx-talk-what-everyone-ge....

Come to think of it, maybe I should stop posting about the joys of not flying since it almost always leads to people responding with thoughtless misunderstandings like: one person's actions don't matter or they need to for work and family. We have to get past these knee-jerk misunderstandings.

Merrill• 7 years ago

The article in Nature published as a "Comment" is "Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against" - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0

For the ice sheet collapses, it takes 100s or 1000s of years for the effects to be realized. Others such as permafrost melting or Amazon forest disappearance are faster, but time scales are not given. For example -

The Greenland ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate3. It could add a further 7 m to sea level over thousands of years if it passes a particular threshold. Beyond that, as the elevation of the ice sheet lowers, it melts further, exposing the surface to ever-warmer air. Models suggest that the Greenland ice sheet could be doomed at 1.5 °C of warming3, which could happen as soon as 2030.
Thus, we might already have committed future generations to living with sea-level rises of around 10 m over thousands of years3. But that timescale is still under our control. The rate of melting depends on the magnitude of warming above the tipping point. At 1.5 °C, it could take 10,000 years to unfold3; above 2 °C it could take less than 1,000 years6. Researchers need more observational data to establish whether ice sheets are reaching a tipping point, and require better models constrained by past and present data to resolve how soon and how fast the ice sheets could collapse.

jezenesklof• 7 years ago

"Scientifically, this provides strong evidence for declaring a state of planetary emergency, to unleash world action that accelerates the path towards a world that can continue evolving on a stable planet."

Talk about weasel words

"Exiting the fossil fuel economy is unlikely before 2050, but with temperature already at 1.1°C above pre-industrial temperature, it is likely Earth will cross the 1.5°C guardrail by 2040. The authors conclude this alone defines an emergency"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told us “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change” likewise Greta Thunberg warned us that according to the UN’s IPCC, (the same one THE Scientists/authors use as a reference on this paper)“we have less than 12 years left in which to correct our mistakes.” and now THE Scientists/authors talk for LIKELY cross the 1.5°C by 2040?

Sharlin3• 7 years ago

The warming is going to continue for decades even after net emissions have dropped to zero. So yes, we're in a real hurry even if the worst effects are still a few decades away. It's not like we can wait UNTIL the 1.5° point is crossed and then magically stop the warming.

bildung• 7 years ago

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez never that said herself, she was paraphrasing young voters.

Lutger2• 7 years ago

Yes, it's because the impact of putting greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is not immediate. Temperatures will continue to rise after the fact. Sea level rise is also much slower, meaning that even if we stop emitting, levels continue to rise for hundreds of years.

There's a lot of uncertainty regarding the tipping points. Some scientists fear that if we cross the 2 degrees celcius, we could have a runaway breakdown due to processes such as melted ice heating the ocean much more and permafrost releasing enormous amounts of ghg.

We don't know for sure that will happen, but its extremely risky. Some fear we could lock in devastating processes within 12 years (even if they won't happen immediately).

Some people think that even if we don't know for sure it'll happen, we should follow the precautionary principle and not take the risk of these extreme events.

melonkidney• 7 years ago

One thing I find encouraging is how many people (particularly young people) are now understanding the seriousness of the climate situation. I would really like to see a public pledge from companies, universities, etc that people who risk their education/career by pushing for real change will not be disadvantaged.

If anyone is interested in helping to make this a reality, shoot me an email at together@highestsupport.com

vixen99• 7 years ago

Getting it into perspective, emissions of CO2 in the UK are now at a level last seen in 1890 and that contribution to world CO2 is around 1% with US at 16% with a bit more than half that from Europe.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-carbon-emissions-in-... https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-

Meanwhile it's widely understood that all major fossil fuel-producing nations—including the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada, and Australia—have ambitious plans to increase production.

It's understanding on the part of the odd 70% that counts and good luck with that. Lectures from the West don't go down very well especially since most of these countries are committed to increasing their standard of living and that's necessarily linked to energy use.

ptah3• 7 years ago

the UK has outsourced its CO2 emissions

BLKNSLVR• 7 years ago

This is how seriously Australian politicians take climate change:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/barnaby-joyce-auctions-lump-of-c...

rayiner8• 7 years ago

It’s important to note that this does not reflect the consensus scientific view: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...

First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species.
I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong.”
All of this helps explain why IPCC anticipates climate change will have a modest impact on economic growth. By 2100, IPCC projects the global economy will be 300 to 500% larger than it is today. Both IPCC and the Nobel-winning Yale economist, William Nordhaus, predict that warming of 2.5°C and 4°C would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by 2% and 5% over that same period.

Additionally, what is a “planetary state of emergency?” Like global martial law? Because if the tipping point theory is correct, that’s what we have to be talking about, right. It can’t just be a metaphor for “try harder to meet climate change protocols.”

Lutger2• 7 years ago

The article you link to does not back up your claim about scientific consensus at all. In fact, it's rather biased and bad from that point of view.

rayiner8• 7 years ago

What bias?

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post

Additionally, the author cites and links to specific facts in IPCC and UN reports regarding population displacement, sea levels, crop yields, and economic impact.

mempko• 7 years ago

Im sorry but, when have economists been right about anything? Economics is not a science, they just use math and big words because real scientists seem to.

rayiner8• 7 years ago

Economists can be pretty damn good at estimating the effect of things on the economy: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/cbo-correctly-predicted-historic-c...

Meanwhile CBO’s 2010 premium projections were remarkably accurate: within 1 percent of actual average 2017 marketplace premiums.

Note that economists aren't running climate models. IPCC climate scientists are running models projecting what will happen (e.g. crop yields will decline by 20%.) IPCC economists are then putting a dollar value on those effects. (If crop yields decline by 20%, what will be the hit on the economy?)

threatofrain• 7 years ago

Economics is a difficult phenomena but any nation or academic body which ignores it study would be severely foolish. There’s no point in bashing its scienciness.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

" around 10 metres of irreversible sea-level rise. Reducing emissions could slow this process, allowing more time for low-lying populations to move."

This seems like hyperbole to me. I'll be glad to buy Hawaiin real estate (at an appropriate discount, of course) to show my sincerity.

Any sellers?

Seriously, articles of this kind are so over the top that they cause mental fatigue for the issue and de-emphasize climate change.

chatmasta• 7 years ago

President Obama seems to agree with you, as he recently bought a mansion on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard.

It’s hard to take climate alarmism seriously when its proponents are taking actions like that.

arrrg• 7 years ago

Barack Obama is a boring, middle of the road, centrist as hell politician.

He is as much a “proponent” of climate change as, say, Angela Merkel. Which is to say, not all that much. He cares a little bit but not that much.

Also, he’s rich and for rich people the risk of sea level rise is dramatically lower because they can fight for their little corner either through technological means or they can just move away and it’s not an existential threat to them, no matter what they do.

Nine climate tipping points now 'active,' warn scientists

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