Image: Dubious climate change “solutions” on display at COP28
Why there’s no climate tipping points in the real world
The temperature potential of the atmosphere is dictated by pressure, mass and gravity.
35 million years ago Antarctica had drifted so far south that ice and snow started to accumulate. It’s been covered with ice ever since and the world, coincidentally (not!) has also been in and out of numerous glaciations periods during that time.
Given how important water is for the earth’s temperature, as we, for example can see with the current El Niño, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone that when more of the earth’s ocean is located at the southern, colder part of the globe, global temperature decreases.
And with the current configuration of the earth’s tectonic plates and how that dictate the oceanic currents we are not anywhere near any climate tipping points towards any meaningful warming (in the real world, of course).
R. J. L.
By Anthony Watts – Climate Change Dispatch
This week a number of mainstream and online media outlets have run alarming headlines warning of imminent “catastrophic climate tipping points,” citing a recently published paper that warns of the immediate danger of passing the 1.5°C mark of planetary warming.
The claim is false. [emphasis, links added]
Not only does objective data show that this mark has already been passed with no effects whatsoever, but the claimed dangers are based on climate model projections, not actual cause-and-effect connections demonstrated by data.
For example, The Guardian blares the headline: Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn, while Politico writes Catastrophic climate ‘tipping points’ may be imminent.
According to The Guardian:
Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned.
Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures.
…
The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one oceanic current in the North Atlantic.
At Politico, the doomsday news is even worse:
The melting Greenland ice sheet is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise — and some experts are warning it could soon cross the threshold into a slow but irreversible death spiral.
A sweeping new scientific report, with contributions from more than 200 researchers, finds that continued warming could trigger not only the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet but a wide variety of tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. Once crossed, those thresholds would have unstoppable consequences.
…
Greenland is one immediate worry. While it’s still unclear exactly how much warming it would take to push the ice sheet over the edge, some experts say it could be as little as 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Temperatures have already risen between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees.
It is worth noting at the outset that the sweeping new scientific report upon which these news articles are based is not a peer-reviewed scientific report, but rather simply a white paper published on a website.
Further, the entire project was funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, aka Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com which has pledged to make its products and their delivery “climate-friendly.”
On this basis, one could be excused for thinking the paper is nothing more than a feel-good marketing ploy to virtue-signal Amazon’s support for the doomsday-oriented climate narrative.
Further undermining the idea that this is an objective scientific document is the fact that the authors describe explicitly political ends as the reason for talking about tipping points.
Their goal is not to provide knowledge for consideration but rather explicitly about motivating political action, as stated in the introduction pulldown preview section:
Why we need to talk about tipping points
This report is for all those concerned with tackling escalating Earth system change and mobilising transformative social change to alter that trajectory, achieve sustainability, and promote social justice. [emphasis mine]
This political advocacy calls into question the scientific claims made in the report.
Addressing the specific claims, the assertions concerning Greenland’s ice melt are wildly overblown, as seen in Figure 1 from Climate at a Glance: Greenland Ice Melt:
What’s true of the Greenland claim is equally true of the other supposedly imminent tipping points assertions made in the report.
The documents consistently fail to reference existing climate data, observed processes, or provide key context, preferring instead to focus on computer climate model projections of the future.
Most importantly, the authors missed the fact the longest existing temperature record on Earth suggests that temperatures have already increased 2.0°C “above preindustrial levels.”
Despite this, no worsening weather trends or damage to human societies from this have been measured.
Europe possesses the best, longest-running temperature records on the planet, [whose] temperature records show warming has already exceeded 1.5°C, as can be seen in Figure 2 below from Berkeley Earth.
Full article …
In the article above Mr. Watts use the below, FAKE graph!
Every graph failing to show 1936 as the warmest year over the last 100 years and 1998 as the second warmest year, is FAKE! Unadjusted termometer data shows a temperature increase of 0,84C on the earth’s surface, since 1875, the coldest year in 10 000 years.
