Meanwhile, back at the ranch, lets take a look,
Sad part is we “must” do nothing. This AGW driven extreme destructive weather will simply continue on its trajectory. We treehugger were ridiculed right and left, still are, but it’s real and it’s happening.
“… Now, imagine being in a sauna wherein the temperature and humidity just keep climbing and climbing. Very quickly the experience will stop being relaxing and become deeply unpleasant.
You’ll manage to lose some heat to begin with by sweating, but ultimately a threshold will be reached beyond which sweating is no longer physically possible. You try the door and it’s locked. There’s no escape – and you have just hours to live.”
It’s a nightmare vision, but such a conspiracy of heat and humidity is increasingly being encountered in the hottest parts of our world. It’s slated to become ever more common as global heating continues to build in the decades ahead, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people."
There would need to be collective societal desire, sense of need and urgency.
But it doesn’t seem that any of our institutions, academia with its philosophical systems (most still under the shadow of its religious origins) and debates did nothing to help our thinking along.
Politicians, business leaders, religious leaders likewise never helped us confront our self-destructive habits. Yeah, the same weaknesses humanity has always known (feared) would destroy us all in the end - and that countless fables have been written about.
We didn’t bother to challenge ourselves enough to gain a bit of wisdom. Wisdom that enabled Earth’s biosphere, and the web of other creatures, into our sphere of personal priorities, or we’d suffocate on our own excesses.
Sure we can point at a lot of wise and wonderful thinkers and writers who tried to warn us and to suggest pathways to detour our march toward our own oblivion.
Instead it’s a story of self-absorbed and self-serving from top to bottom as
Rousseau so ably explains.
(I was inspired by Prof. Johnathan Bi to purchase an audiobook of Rousseau’s, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and get to know it myself.)
Instead, our disconnect from the natural world has never been ably confronted, thus we see the mess we’ve created for ourselves, and for the most part we don’t even have the dignity to show any repentance.
Human nature run amok, we became gods, never adding any wisdom to our growing power, now the party is over, but the haves refuse to recognize the problem until it slams into their lives. That’s the natural man, no wiser than the other natural creatures that Earth gave birth to.
That cuts deep for folks who’ve grown up believing in human learning and the exceptionalism of our thought processes, but it was all in our heads.
While the future, that is physical reality, was in our hands - as opposed to our imaginative human mindscape.
Thus we have the likes of dante555, and myself, and others who sometimes want to pull our hairs out at the utter self destructive stupidity and blind sidedness of so, so, so many. It’s emotional and writing is a one way to work the personal issue of keeping oneself in balance as we dance through our day by days.
Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course
RENÉ M. VAN WESTEN, MICHAEL KLIPHUIS, AND HENK A. DIJKSTRA
SCIENCE ADVANCES - 9 Feb 2024 - Vol 10, Issue 6
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
Abstract
One of the most prominent climate tipping elements is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which can potentially collapse because of the input of fresh water in the North Atlantic. Although AMOC collapses have been induced in complex global climate models by strong freshwater forcing, the processes of an AMOC tipping event have so far not been investigated.
Here, we show results of the first tipping event in the Community Earth System Model, including the large climate impacts of the collapse.
Using these results, we develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal of AMOC tipping: the minimum of the AMOC-induced freshwater transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic.
Reanalysis products indicate that the present-day AMOC is on route to tipping. The early warning signal is a useful alternative to classical statistical ones, which, when applied to our simulated tipping event, turn out to be sensitive to the analyzed time interval before tipping.
Though the basic AMOC mechanism “was understood” and we learned it collapsed some 15 millennia ago as the last major ice age was melting away. Still it seemed utter science fiction that our warming could induce such an event, that is before the turn of the century. Then some ‘radicals’ started calling it out and writing about it, and roundly dismissed, not anymore.
