[FRIAM] Bad news about the climate

[Steve Smith]

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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