I love me a good dose of Sabine... her flat-delivery of equally serious
and glib lines is killer IMO... and for the most part I feel compelled
to defer to her facts and analyses (almost) without reserve. (/around
13:30 she said "so mind-f#%#%ingly stupid" /). I'm surprised she didn't
actually invoke the biblical "four horsemen"! Her closing statement
with the "stop gluing yourself to things" sorta made Sabine the
anti-Greta? Both of those made me choke on my coffee <grin>.
The whole North-Atlantic circulation thing (AMOC tipping point)
threatening to undermine the British Isles and Scandinavia's relatively
mild winters (moderated by oceanic heat transport from the equator) is
one of the things I expect to crash a lot of expectations (and economies
and ???) around the industrial north. New England is also implicated
in a major/abrupt local climate change from this as well.
I did a short stint with a pre-climate (atmospheric-ocean model
coupling) modeling team at LANL in the 90s and what I enjoyed most was
the cognitive dissonance amongst the researchers who on one hand felt
they couldn't predict *anything* confidently but recognized the
incredibly high stakes and the emerging awareness of the implications of
dynamical systems theory on the domain... how many bifurcation points
likely surrounded the relatively linear "basin" the climate has been
wandering in since the Younger Dryas.
Without exception, every scientist I worked with then privately declared
"we have a problem!" even though they didn't feel they had anywhere near
the evidence to say anything that strongly in their publications.
Anecdotally, I've been experiencing a fairly steady winter-warming at my
high-desert location 20 miles outside Santa Fe at about 5400ft where I
catch the cold-air flow off of both the Sangre de Christo and the Jemez
mtns. Winters have gotten drier for the most part and while the lows
still maintain (see above), the highs during the winter (and dead of
summer) have risen consistently for the last 20 years I've lived at this
location.
The climate and long-range weather forecasts for the area that I've
checked out are somewhat mutually contradictory and my
half-full/half-empty biases lead me to smug satisfaction when my fruit
trees promise to do better than historically, even if my tomatoes freeze
on Oct 1 no matter what (I've tossed plastic film over them and had them
keep on growing/ripening until Thanksgiving a few years when I've
bothered)... root vegetables can now stay in the ground until I dig to
eat and winter squash on the vine outside longer and longer.
On the half-empty side, surface water is becoming more and more dear
here, my AC-free summers are getting more uncomfortable and it is likely
enough that all of this is a minor perturbation compared to what might
hit this region in the next few decades as various major tipping points tip.
<virtue signal>
If I were younger, I'd probably be more (personally) worried. I tell
my 40-something progeny that they should plan on the possibility
that they might live forever and their children are even more likely
to. Me, I'm just happy that when my hand-carved wooden chompers get
too slimy and splintery to use that the folks with drills and
novacaine can make me a "screw-in set" like Nicks!
Meanwhile the only thing I can think to do is keep lowering my own
personal footprint and readying my home(stead) for another
generation to pick up wherever I leave off with an equally lowered
(residence-induced) footprint. I'm not vegan (yet) but I try to buy
my eggs from local home-raised sources and keep my agri-industry
consumption of milk/cheese/butter down to a fraction of my former
appetite.
I've lowered my heating demand (via wood-burning) to near net-zero,
burning (almost) only the prunings and trimmings from my own (1.5
acre high desert) property (and some from neighbors who CBB). PV
tech is mature enough that *used* gear on the order of $10k
investment can probably allow me to quit spinning the hydro-turbines
up the river (Abiqui Lake) and spewing coal-smoke out of the
4-corners plant my co-op draws primarily from. A couple of
mini-split heat-pumps might give me both relief from the worst
summer heat and displace yet-more of the cellulose I (grow) and
burn. A little more PV and I can displace the 20lb propane
cylinder I burn for cooking in the summer into induction cooking?
Nevertheless, I'm still a big "part of the problem" just by being a
member of the first-world economy... even if I quit burning any
transportation fuel (jet or train or private auto) entirely and eat
mostly plants (not too much as M. Pollan recommends).
</virtue signal>
On 1/27/24 1:59 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I apologize for this relatively mass email. It was prompted by a video
<https://youtu.be/4S9sDyooxf4?si=_A767WzYTxriYGdl> by Sabine
Hossenfelder, Sabine is a theoretical physicist who has spent much of
her recent life as a popular science writer and video maker. See her
Wikipedia page <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder>.
The video linked to above talks about climate models. The bottom line
is that it appears that most of the current models have underestimated
how quickly earth will warm. The consequences are frightening.
_
_
__-- Russ Abbott
Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles
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