The Scariest Climate Science Paper I’ve Ever Read?

This month a paper came out that honestly chilled me. It was about tipping points in climate - a well-known concept that the climate can change abruptly if certain conditions are met in certain elements of the climate system, such as excess melting of the Greenland ice sheet. That wasn't new. What was new was the threshold these tipping elements could flip - according to this research, we could be triggering some tipping elements already - and if we warm the planet by just 1.5°C then we are likely to do so.

The climate is still within our control. But if we keep emitting as we are, that isn't always going to be the case.

Every. Tenth. Of. A. Degree. Counts.

This new paper from McKay et al showed that there isn't a neat relationship between cumulative carbon emissions and global warming - there can be step changes thanks to internal variability, rapidly pushing the Earth into different climates. In this video I talk about climate tipping points, how some are already possible today, and will become likely at just 1.5C of warming.


References:
1. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/jou...
2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073...
3. http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/stu...
4. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOd-J...
newtboysays...

I think the truly scary part is that our emissions today continue to have an effect on the climate for decades - centuries, so to affect today’s climate we needed to change our emissions decades ago or find feasible, economically and ecologically viable massive carbon sequestration techniques yesterday.

That’s why I believe we are locked into massive unsurvivable changes as a best case scenario, and a mass extinction of anything bigger than a large cat. Much worse if we continue the current course.

newtboysays...

Any sufficiently intelligent AI might just reinforce climate change as the simplest way to hobble and eradicate us with the least effort.

BSRsaid:

Artificial Intelligence will probably surpass climate change in destroying humanity.

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