Thank you Richard (and also Chris and Ric for your comments)...I have a science background (mostly medical) so with some slow slow reading and rereading I am able to follow your explanations and I really appreciate you putting this all together in one place...It is so affirming, comforting to be in the company of folks that seem to understand... The idea that most of humanity, along with so much of the precious life on Earth, could be gone in maybe a few more years is really really painful, nauseating...But I do not see at this point how it could be otherwise...Again, thank you Richard for all the time and effort you put in to these reports...
As you’re seen prob via comments I’ve made here and when we had some small exchanges on Reddit, I’ve been focused on the exponential rate of acceleration and how that moves. It’s kinda like trading stocks and using math to understand market movement, Fibonacci and such. There are these key points that can trigger massive systemic movement in that world and it’s no different in physics, just different mediums.
If the rate of change itself is changing so significantly so quickly, and that very change is itself causing itself to accelerate even further with each small step-change…that’s a snowball rolling down a mountain and right about now that thing is getting big enough and fast enough to wipe out the entire show.
What it means is we know a lot less than we think we do. I used to trade commodities using technical analysis and as soon as I had back-tested a theory . . . It stopped working, LOL
The injection of so much carbon into the atmospheric part of the carbon cycle really only has one parallel: when the mantle plume beneath the Siberian traps burned through several km thick layers (some say 12) of coal across an area somewhere between the size of Greenland and the continental USA. I think the rate of carbon dioxide release now is at least ten times faster than then. The Great Dying / Permian-Triassic Extinction might be a good model for what to expect. Peter Brannen's *The Ends of the World* has good coverage of it. On YouTube, Gutsick Gibbon's *The Deadliest Pattern in Nature* has some brief summaries in A/V format. The Permian-Triassic had 250M years less of solar luminosity increases than now and still got uncomfortably close to the moist greenhouse limit. This will not end well.
You are right, the analogs that best mirror what we are doing are the Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps. Lava plumes tapping into and igniting major coal and oil deposits that then burn over several million years. Gradually increasing CO2 levels into the +1500ppm range.
What we have done, is compress that process down into about 150 years.
There is NO natural example of what we have done.
Absolutely, "this will not end well".
Try convincing enough people to vote that way, when the most profitable industry in human history is aligned against you.
This keeps me up at night a bit. I’m a systems thinker and like to understand them. I keep a saltwater aquarium and that’s helped me fully comprehend what happens to a closed system when inputs are adjusted. It’s insane. The compression we’ve done to the energy state of this giant aquarium is not going to be so like a supernova. A massive initial phase change.
Are you saying we won't need 1200 ppm if the albedo continues to decline? I had to write this question before I finished reading the article cause I'm old and I forget things.
I think this is the likely scenario. We often base models on singular orientations or perspectives instead of a multitude. And how could we? We are monkeys. We primarily want to control reality and struggle to accept outcomes that we have little to do with.
Still observing to see what happens the rest of the year but if the last 13 months are any indication, we probably can’t reverse this step-change, and it isn’t even finished yet. If the rate of acceleration itself is accelerating, doubling in 2010s and then doing another 25-50% jump in the short term, like a handful of years….we could see another doubling very very quickly and if *that* does *another* doubling short term that’s how we blow past 1C per decade and likely start peaking out towards 2. Obviously there are limitations from a physics standpoint from what I understand. We don’t jump to like 10C per decade or whatever probably, but we will be long dead even in a scenario where we are breaching 1C per decade, before that’s even something to worry about.
The entirety of climate modelling is basically numerical analysis of numerous coupled PDE's. The differential calculus in turn is in effect linearisation, esp. SPDE's, where stochastic integration etc. largely considers non-linearities to be largely uninterpretable. I think non-linear diffeq's are most of the time both intractable overall beyond numerically incalculable. The extant material on numerical stochastic non-linear partial differential equations of significant sophistication seems to be not much older than 10 years old. So people haven't really even figured out how to make the calculators to even use the equations yet.
Looking at the rapid warming we are experiencing lately, whatever the cause, I predict that we will soon see the widespread use of aerosols to cool things down below the lethal range. I hope this will be done using injection into the troposphere, to somewhat localize the effects, rather than ozone-damaging stratosphere injection, but nobody can stop either from being done and the bar is low with regard to difficulty. Opponents of geoengineering have missed the boat - we have been doing that since the industrial revolution, and now we have a responsibility to fix it. That would take generations to accomplish, and in the meantime we would have to lean on geoengineering whether we like it or not. What is the alternative?
Thank you Richard (and also Chris and Ric for your comments)...I have a science background (mostly medical) so with some slow slow reading and rereading I am able to follow your explanations and I really appreciate you putting this all together in one place...It is so affirming, comforting to be in the company of folks that seem to understand... The idea that most of humanity, along with so much of the precious life on Earth, could be gone in maybe a few more years is really really painful, nauseating...But I do not see at this point how it could be otherwise...Again, thank you Richard for all the time and effort you put in to these reports...
As you’re seen prob via comments I’ve made here and when we had some small exchanges on Reddit, I’ve been focused on the exponential rate of acceleration and how that moves. It’s kinda like trading stocks and using math to understand market movement, Fibonacci and such. There are these key points that can trigger massive systemic movement in that world and it’s no different in physics, just different mediums.
If the rate of change itself is changing so significantly so quickly, and that very change is itself causing itself to accelerate even further with each small step-change…that’s a snowball rolling down a mountain and right about now that thing is getting big enough and fast enough to wipe out the entire show.
Pedal to the metal. We can no longer stop the machine than, say, the solitary ant can stop the marching line.
Somebody probably needs to throw the first stone, though. Time is running out, if it already hasn't.
We don't want to die without fighting, do we? Do we?
What it means is we know a lot less than we think we do. I used to trade commodities using technical analysis and as soon as I had back-tested a theory . . . It stopped working, LOL
The injection of so much carbon into the atmospheric part of the carbon cycle really only has one parallel: when the mantle plume beneath the Siberian traps burned through several km thick layers (some say 12) of coal across an area somewhere between the size of Greenland and the continental USA. I think the rate of carbon dioxide release now is at least ten times faster than then. The Great Dying / Permian-Triassic Extinction might be a good model for what to expect. Peter Brannen's *The Ends of the World* has good coverage of it. On YouTube, Gutsick Gibbon's *The Deadliest Pattern in Nature* has some brief summaries in A/V format. The Permian-Triassic had 250M years less of solar luminosity increases than now and still got uncomfortably close to the moist greenhouse limit. This will not end well.
You are right, the analogs that best mirror what we are doing are the Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps. Lava plumes tapping into and igniting major coal and oil deposits that then burn over several million years. Gradually increasing CO2 levels into the +1500ppm range.
What we have done, is compress that process down into about 150 years.
There is NO natural example of what we have done.
Absolutely, "this will not end well".
Try convincing enough people to vote that way, when the most profitable industry in human history is aligned against you.
This keeps me up at night a bit. I’m a systems thinker and like to understand them. I keep a saltwater aquarium and that’s helped me fully comprehend what happens to a closed system when inputs are adjusted. It’s insane. The compression we’ve done to the energy state of this giant aquarium is not going to be so like a supernova. A massive initial phase change.
Are you saying we won't need 1200 ppm if the albedo continues to decline? I had to write this question before I finished reading the article cause I'm old and I forget things.
I think this is the likely scenario. We often base models on singular orientations or perspectives instead of a multitude. And how could we? We are monkeys. We primarily want to control reality and struggle to accept outcomes that we have little to do with.
Still observing to see what happens the rest of the year but if the last 13 months are any indication, we probably can’t reverse this step-change, and it isn’t even finished yet. If the rate of acceleration itself is accelerating, doubling in 2010s and then doing another 25-50% jump in the short term, like a handful of years….we could see another doubling very very quickly and if *that* does *another* doubling short term that’s how we blow past 1C per decade and likely start peaking out towards 2. Obviously there are limitations from a physics standpoint from what I understand. We don’t jump to like 10C per decade or whatever probably, but we will be long dead even in a scenario where we are breaching 1C per decade, before that’s even something to worry about.
This is my thoughts too. We don't have even one more decade. And nobody cares.
Who cares about fossil records? They're "really old" and "complicated" and those were cold water Alligators anyway.
The models are only linear because that how they were created. Fifth grade math.
"Let's see now, if we go up by 400 every ten years, then it's obvious it will be 40 per year" Why is THAT obvious?
Sorry . . . I'm starting to rant . . .
The entirety of climate modelling is basically numerical analysis of numerous coupled PDE's. The differential calculus in turn is in effect linearisation, esp. SPDE's, where stochastic integration etc. largely considers non-linearities to be largely uninterpretable. I think non-linear diffeq's are most of the time both intractable overall beyond numerically incalculable. The extant material on numerical stochastic non-linear partial differential equations of significant sophistication seems to be not much older than 10 years old. So people haven't really even figured out how to make the calculators to even use the equations yet.
What....?
Looking at the rapid warming we are experiencing lately, whatever the cause, I predict that we will soon see the widespread use of aerosols to cool things down below the lethal range. I hope this will be done using injection into the troposphere, to somewhat localize the effects, rather than ozone-damaging stratosphere injection, but nobody can stop either from being done and the bar is low with regard to difficulty. Opponents of geoengineering have missed the boat - we have been doing that since the industrial revolution, and now we have a responsibility to fix it. That would take generations to accomplish, and in the meantime we would have to lean on geoengineering whether we like it or not. What is the alternative?