Climate Change - increasingly horrible disasters loom

I just got an email from the social security administration praising the bill. I've never seen correspondence from them like that. It seems they'll be feeding us propaganda from all government agencies now.

To be perfectly honest, it seems like the Project 2025 gang is doing an experiment in Armageddon. They seem to be seeking to prove whether or not humans will ascend to heaven when (human) life on Earth is destroyed.

I suppose the term "fanatics" fits the bill here.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/climat...

Scientists have discovered key ocean current in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica is reversing.

We are transitioning to a completely different version of planet Earth ..... one which is not at all compatible with human industrial infrastructure.

I posted this few days ago without reading the study and was reminded why you should never do that.

The study itself doesn't even mention reversing the current or doubling the CO2. There's stuff about the increase of salinity of surface water and reversal of the trend that the surface water was previously getting fresher, not saltier. But those news articles about the study do not match the claims in the study at all.

From the study:

So basically the model missed or underestimated some causal factor? Like something along the lines of the discovery of dark matter? I read it when you first posted it; that was my take.

OK ... so what does the observable data tell us ?

CO2 has already increased from 280 ppm to 430 ppm in roughly a century. In the 1960's, it increased by 1 ppm per year. Now it is rising by ~ 3 ppm per year.

Regarding Antarctic sea ice extent ... the data shows that we are in an unprecedented era (as far as human observation exists) of low sea ice extent.

To be a denier in 2025 is an act of extreme logical contortion. Of course, you can challenge the hypothesis that human GHG emissions are the causal factor .... but you can't come up with any alternative hypothesis which makes any sense.

The ocean emits CO2 in ways climatologists don't fully understand. As evidence, I submit the very study you’re pointing to.

You literally picked one of the worst examples to make your case. When scientists are “stunned” by what they’re seeing it usually means reality just blindsided the models. These findings call into question key assumptions baked into every climate projection we have. Not refutation; into question. That's how science works.

Yeah sounds like that (though comparing it to dark matter seems way too strong heh), don't really know a thing about ocean currents but still gonna be interesting to find out the cause.

Or.. you could just read what I posted instead of what you feel I posted?

I said the news article about the papers isn't accurate, because.. it wasn't? I think it's really important to be accurate in our claims, as you make a mistake and rubes who don't have the minuscule critical thought process required to understand climate change is real can find out your mistake from some talking head and dismiss all your claims based on that.

Here's some basic physics for you.

Atmospheric gases dissolve in water. The solubility is dependent upon temperature. Colder water is more soluble and has a greater capacity to hold atmospheric gases such as CO2.

When the water gets warmer, it absorbs less. A greater proportion of what humans emit remains in the atmosphere as a result.

The Earth's carbon is stored in a lot of different places called sinks. It's in the atmosphere. It's in the oceans. It's in the frozen Earth. It's in plants. The key to understanding climate change is understanding the forces that cause carbon to move between the various sinks.

The thing which is unknown here is the dynamics of the ocean current. They don't know why its shifting. But the consequences of cold, and therefore carbon rich, water upwelling are understood. That cold water will take its carbon to the surface and transfer it from ocean sink to atmospheric sink.

Right, I'm not disputing that. But the whole point of the study was to sound the alarm because - based on their own modeling - they didn’t expect to see this kind of slowdown in ocean circulation for another 50 years or so. What did their model miss? Idk, but based on their conclusions:

So again, idk, but the experts seem to think something is wrong with some of the bolded. And maybe (or hopefully) when the figure that out they might also find other options, like adding plankton, etc. idk. Or maybe it will be a worse case scenario where it's too late to reverse or mitigate but at least give us a heads-up to better prepare ourselves. Or maybe their readings are simply off. One thing that I did find odd considering the potential significance of this were basically 'crickets' when I searched for some more analysis.

The fundamentals of climate science are actually not that difficult for a layperson to grasp IF they are curious to learn.

The problem is that most people find the emotional reality of it too overwhelming to take. All of their emotional energy is dedicated to their personal lives in the short term. Nature gives us a bias toward short-term ,,,, if we don't survive today, then tomorrow is irrelevant to us.

At some point, one has to question the wisdom of even telling people that they jumped out of a plane without a parachute. If you don't have a solution to the problem, it seems that ignorance is bliss.

That seems to be the strategy of those running the US govt at the moment. Ignorance is bliss. Chip away at any science funding which seeks to tell people what we're in for. Turn off the satellite data which helps forecasters determine if a storm is rapdily intensifying at night. It's Orwellian stuff coming to life.

That's great. How have our preparations been doing over the last 20-30 years we've known about climate change?

I think they are referring to the kind of preparations people make when they receive a terminal diagnosis. It changes one's priorities.

I'm personally not there yet .... but a lot of people have made the decision that we're in hospice mode for modern human civilization with all of its excesses and luxuries. It's like the contrast between the great orgy of the Roaring 20's and the Great Depression.

It's a lot like a person falling out of a plane without a parachute. The collision is already happening and the evidence of it is abundant.

It's especially hard for the people who spend every moment of their lives trying to control their life outcomes. That control is an illusion. There are larger forces in the world than our willpower and human "ingenuity".

There is nothing in our evolutionary experience as humans which has prepared us to successfully deal with our insatiable desire to consume. Indeed, evolution has rewarded us for hoarding in the past. Hoarding is deeply wired in many of us. So is tribalism.

That's what makes this problem so difficult to solve. It's not a technical problem. We have the theoretical capability to survive this. The problem is that we don't know how to let go of hoarding and tribalism. There was a time bomb embedded in human DNA ....... and it's blowing up. We just happen to be alive in the time of that explosion.

Watching people come to terms with it (or not) is interesting. The idea of not being in control is impossible for some to stomach. A lot of them want to kill the messenger.

Actually now they've completely changed the news article about the ocean current that I posted before to actually match the findings of the study. So the past few messages might look weird if someone's coming around to read those now, but I think now we should at least agree that the first version of it was just a pile of crap?

I remember stuff like that in high school geology. Not all the details but just the basics of why it gets colder in the winter, why the ocean is warmer in some areas, how the earth goes through these cycles, etc. So there's never been a time in my adult life that I didn't think we're heading for another ice age. And for some reason (probably my geology teacher) I thought we would reach that peak and then start down the slope heading for another ice age in a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand years. Then there was the issue with aerosols, which altered that timeline in my mind from a couple hundred/thousand to 100-1k years. So all this just modifies my timeline, not shocking me into hospice mode.

As I said, outside of the doomsayers, no one is claiming this is going to have much affect at all in terms of the earth's population for the foreseeable future. But it will impose significant hardships on people, especially those who don't have anywhere near the West's abilities to adapt. And that's the point: even if we were green, it's still happening and our and our descendants efforts will mostly center around adapting to something we aren't the root cause of and probably can't prevent, at least with our present technology.

What is your definition of "doomsayer".

If your definition is that anyone who says that Earth's population is going to be impacted in the foreseeable future is a doomsayer, then by definition, only doomsayers are going to be the ones saying it.

What you are doing is trying to discredit valid argument from credible sources by demonizing those sources with a word (doomsayer).

You are not engaging in any credible investigation as to whether the people who foresee population collapse are right or wrong. You are seeking to discredit them via shallow rhetorical means.

The "we're doomed; we'll never make it" people like Jem Bendell, Guy McPherson, etc.

Big difference between Jem Bendell and Guy McPherson.

Bendell is preaching post-collapse renewal. He's not a doomer who says we're going extinct.

McPherson is a cartoonish and sensationalist click-baiter. He's not a serious and respected Earth systems scientist in the manner of James Hansen, Johan Rockstrom, Stephan Rahmsdorf, Jennifer Francis or Eric Rignot.

The Earth science community has a lot of different personalities. You also have your paid lackeys like Judith Curry who is paid to fabricate doubt,

The biggest posers are the Democrats who market themselves as being sensitive to the issue while doing nothing substantive. Obama's Paris Accord was a total sham with no jurisdiction or commitment. The US became a fracking giant during his presidency. Al Gore is a poser. Lecturing the world while have an enormous personal carbon footprint. The irony of Biden appointing a guy who travels by private jet (Kerry) to be his climate envoy. ROFLMAO. The people who fall for that nonsense are apex gullibility.

Well not "going extinct” is a pretty low bar for success, imo. Saying societal collapse is inevitable and human civilization as we know it is basically over is still doomish. And like I said, I think that view is just another form of science denial because it's not at all where the consensus is.

Right, but the overwhelming consensus (even from the IPCC) is that societal collapse isn’t inevitable. I mean, if it were, we wouldn’t see the massive effort addressing global warming. Within that view, the range of possible outcomes - if we don’t get temps under control - runs from worst-case scenarios of localized collapses to us adapting, but with major economic and generational hardship. But even in that range, it’s not about millions or billions of people being wiped out. More that if population declines, it’s will be through lower birth rates as a form of adaptation, not from massive starvation or getting swept away in floods. That sort of apocalyptic imagery just isn’t what mainstream science is projecting.

Which "mainstream" scientists do you follow ? I named a handful.

Fyi - your language regarding the IPCC ("even from the IPCC") suggests that you find the IPCC to be a more doomish entity than the mainstream.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Each IPCC iteration (there have been 6 major cycles) is more worrisome than the previous one. Every cycle reveals a more fragile state than the previous one. The only thing consistent about the IPCC is that they consistently understate the risks. The reasons for that are obvious.

The IPCC is a UN institution. The scientists appointed to participate are screened by a governing body which is funded and controlled by the same oligarchy which controls the rest of our government. The reports from the IPCC have to pass through government filters before they are authorized to be issued.

Even with all of their conservative biases, the IPCC still presents a dire picture and the real world observations are worse than IPCC projections.

So ... what we have here is John21 stating that "mainstream science" is not projecting catastrophic consequences. But at the same time John21 can't name a single mainstream climate scientist.

That doesn't bode well for John21's credibility as a commentator on the topic.

I'll take a shot at putting some of this conversation into a simple mathematical context.

The human supremacists are citing our ability to survive an ice age as evidence that we can survive anything.

Prior to the industrial revolution, humans have lived and evolved in a +/- 120 ppm range of CO2 values.

The last ice age we bottomed out at 180 ppm. Boston and NYC were under ice.

At 280 ppm, we built cities and human civilization.

CO2 equivalent (including methane) is now over 560 ppm. That's a range expansion of 280 ppm to 400 ppm total.

Climate change has a delayed fuse. There are feedback effects and tipping points along the way to reaching a new equilibrium. What does the equilbrium to 560 ppm look like ? And oh, by the way, the increase in CO2 equivalent is rising faster over time. It seems to have the gathering momentum of a rock rolling down a hill.

Look at the level of conversation on this forum .... we do not even have the capacity to engage with simple logical and mathematical discussion, let alone contemplate the answers to this above question. Instead, we get childish assertions of human supremacy.

Drought will impact capacity for copper mining

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/pres...

Probably because John21 isn't interested in getting drawn into a battle of experts since he isn't one. Here's John21's argument:

P1: UN and other population agencies project global population growth slowing and leveling off by 2100, primarily due to declining birth rates, not massive die-offs from climate collapse.

P2: Virtually the entire scientific community is united in calling for action, which they wouldn’t be if total or widespread societal collapse were inevitable.

C: Therefore, virtually the entire scientific community expects serious risks and challenges ahead but believes we can adapt and prevent widespread collapse and avoid the total societal breakdown Bendell et al. predict.