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DeeReader's avatar

I believe you, as do many of your readers. Please take care of yourself Richard. I’m so grateful for your writing, thank you.

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Dirk Dunning's avatar

Richard,

Welcome to the club. Many major climate scientists got there about a dozen to 15 years ago.

The models weren't defective or broken. They were chosen to give answers that the economic and political powers were willing to accept. And even then they wouldn't accept them.

The only potential savior in the system is the immense amount of ice on Greenland and Antarctica. Their buffering potential has not yet been exceeded, at least not in the near term.

But ... What the experts realized 15-25 years ago was that if we push so hard with our emissions that we cause any of a dozen tipping points to be crossed that it is game over.

The politicans and others could not and willfully would not understand that. We have crossed 5 or 6 of those already. It is game over. But since it hasn't sent things careeing out of control on a month to month basis, the leaders and politicans and others would not accept that anything was wrong.

They are indiviudally and collectively wrong. They seem to operate in the view that until we cross ALL of the tipping points there is no problem. And even then, that we somehow magically get a reprieve then to do something. Not so.

Now that we are seeing the early stages of the destabilization of the atmospheric circulation with the jet streams becoming wild and wooly, with immense surges of heat being sent north and cold south, things have gotten wildly out of control.

The oceans are dying. Anoxic zones are forming. More will. The AMOC is on the virge of dying which will temporarily create havoc and cold in northern Europe as the Gulf Stream cuts across the Atlantic to Spain.

Tundra fires will increase and both the 1,500 gigatons of carbon stored there and the methane clathrates will "break".

And nothing will ever be the same again.

The gentle ice age world we have been living in for all of humanities time on the Earth is about to end. We will not rapdily rocket (in geologic terms) to hothouse earth conditions. Agriculture will collpase. Most species will perish.

But gelogic timescales aren't human timescales. And so we are the frogs being slowly boiled on the stove.

Even the pandemic forms a part of this. We humans want. We want what we want. We see in timeframes of a year or so, if that. We cannot conceive that we could impact something as large as the Earth. But we have. And so now we begin in earnest the rapid shift to hothouse Earth, slowed only by the time it takes the ice to melt.

And yet, a lot of our brethern are steadfastly convinced that the scribblings of people 2,000 years ago control everything.

The release of the added carbin do not give us enough time to mend our ways and to reverse course.

The release of the tundra carbon and the clathrates will seal our fate. And we cannot turn things fast enough to stop that.

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