Re: The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy Archived Message
Posted by Tomski on March 15, 2019, 12:58 am, in reply to "The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy"
In general, imo, the Vice article describes reasonably well what the author wrote, as I understand it (skim read the paper ... 36 pages). However, what caught my attention is his assertion that implies that (some?) measurements (temperature rise, ice loss, elevated methane concentrations etc.) have been projected in a linear manner and that the climate scientific community has not caught up to the latest trends which are non-linear. Here is the .pdf link to the paper ... http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf Obviously this may change one's perspective if one is considering that we are in a 'runaway climate change' scenario already. 10 years ... grimmer prediction than I've come across before. For the flavour: Our Non-Linear World This paper is not the venue for a detailed examination of all the latest climate science. However, I reviewed the scientific literature from the past few years and where there was still large uncertainty then sought the latest data from research institutes. In this section I summarise the findings to establish the premise that it is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today. The simple evidence of global ambient temperature rise is undisputable. Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001, and global temperatures have increased by 0.9°C since 1880 (NASA/GISS, 2018). The most surprising warming is in the Arctic, where the 2016 land surface temperature was 2.0°C above the 1981-2010 average, breaking the previous records of 2007, 2011, and 2015 by 0.8°C, representing a 3.5°C increase since the record began in 1900 (Aaron- Morrison et al, 2017). This data is fairly easy to collate and not widely challenged, so swiftly finds its way into academic publications. However, to obtain a sense of the implications of this warming on environment and society, one needs realtime data on the current situation and the trends that it may infer. Climate change and its associated impacts have, as we will see, been significant in the last few years. Therefore, to appreciate the situation we need to look directly to the research institutes, researchers and their websites, for the most recent information. That means using, but not relying solely on, academic journal articles and the slowly produced reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This international institution has done useful work but has a track record of significantly underestimating the pace of change, which has been more accurately predicted over past decades by eminent climate scientists. Therefore, in this review, I will draw upon a range of sources, with a focus on data since 2014. That is because, unfortunately, data collected since then is often consistent with non-linear changes to our environment. Non-linear changes are of central importance to understanding climate change, as they suggest both that impacts will be far more rapid and severe than predictions based on linear projections and that the changes no longer correlate with the rate of anthropogenic carbon emissions. In other words - ‘runaway climate change.’
|
|