“How close is our planet to experiencing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change?” – Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
“That’s the big question we’re all trying to answer,” Professor Matthew England from UNSW told 9news.com.au.
How close is our planet to experiencing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change?
By Daniel Jeffrey 12:34 PM July 30, 2024
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How many years do we have left to stop climate change?
Rather than talking about whether climate change can be stopped, it is a little more useful to look at important “tipping points”.
“(These) include ice sheet collapse, melting permafrost, ocean hypoxia, ocean acidification, the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and changes in ocean currents, such as the slowing of the Atlantic Upwelling,” UNSW Climate Change Research Centre director Katrin Meissner told 9news.com.au.
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So how far are we from them?
“That’s the big question we’re all trying to answer,” Professor Matthew England from UNSW told 9news.com.au.
“In a way, that’s the biggest unknown we have.
“It is safe to say that we know these tipping points exist. What we know less is how close we are to them.
“For example, some people say we have passed the tipping point of the Greenland ice sheet.”
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“On human-relevant time scales, none of the impacts we see today are reversible, even those not related to tipping points,” Meissner said.
“They can only continue like this or get worse.”
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The big question I want to ask is whether these people are actually doing science.
In science, prediction is the most important thing – if your theory doesn’t make testable predictions, it’s not a scientific theory.
Ability to distort (or refutation) Is one inference criteria for evaluating scientific theories and hypotheses, given by philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The logic of scientific discovery (1934).[B] ONE theory or hypothesis To be verifiable (or can be denied) if possible a reasonable way contradicted by one experimental test.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
It is a statement that all the ice sheets will one day melt – the ancient climate history of the Earth is littered with periods when the polar ice sheets melted. For most of Earth’s history, there were no polar ice sheets, and by ancient climate standards, the world today is experiencing an extremely cold period.
From NOAA;
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Beginning during the period known as the Pleistocene, this ice age began about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,000 years ago.
Like all ice ages, the most recent ice age brought a series of glacial advances and retreats. In fact, Technically, we are still in an ice age. We are just living our lives in an interglacial period.
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Read more: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-coldest-earths-ever-been
But a statement like “They can only maintain the status quo or get worse” implies that things are getting worse – but doesn’t help us reject that hypothesis.
In my opinion, making predictions that are so fundamentally untestable violates the basic principles of science. If your prediction of an impending disaster has no firm timetable, If it cannot be proven by scientific testing, it is not science.
A prediction like “the ice will melt by 2030, and this will catastrophically sink $100 billion worth of real estate” would be a testable prediction. All we have to do is wait until 2030, then point and smile.
More importantly, we can use such predictions as a yardstick to measure the comparative value of proposed climate action. Should people living at higher elevations be taxed a trillion dollars to pay for mitigating $100 billion of problems that only affect wealthy, high-income lowlands? Perhaps cities deemed at risk should decide for themselves how reliable such predictions are and foot their own climate adaptation bills.
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