Posts Tagged ‘climate science’
“Every picture tells a story”*…
The world’s populations is unevenly spread across the globe. But, plotted by latitude (as per this visualization from Engaging Data), it’s a little more concentrated…
… which is interesting (perhaps better said, “bracing”) to consider aside this illustration from NOAA…
Global warming is coming for most of us: “World Population Distribution by Latitude and Longitude,” from @engagingdata.bsky.social and @climate.noaa.gov.
See also: “The world is heating up. How much can our bodies handle?” from @gristnews.bsky.social and “Understanding Climate Migration,” from RAND.
* traditional saying
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As we feel the heat, we might spare a thought for John Graunt; he died on this date in 1674. A haberdasher turned statistician, he is considered by many to be the father of demography (the statistical study of human populations).
A charter member of The Royal Society, Graunt distributed a 90-page book, Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality at the February, 1662 Society meeting. He described his work as having “reduced several great confused volumes” of parish records into a few easily to understood tables, and “abridged such Observations… into a few succinct Paragraphs.” He initiated “life tables” of life expectancy. His use of demographics was further pioneered by his friend Sir William Petty and Edmond Halley, the Astronomer Royal.
Graunt’s work also gives him some claim to having been the first epidemiologist.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.”*…
Ethan Siegel reminds us that the world– the living world– almost did end in ice…
… one event came closer than any other to bringing an end to life on Earth: a catastrophe known as either the Great Oxidation Event or the Great Oxygenation Event. Oxygen, one of the hallmark characteristics of our living Earth, was a tremendous destructive force when it first arrived in any sort of meaningful abundance some ~2 billion years after Earth first took shape. The slow alteration of our atmosphere by the gradual addition of oxygen proved to be fatal to the most common types of organism that were present on Earth at the time. For several hundred million years, the Earth entered a horrific ice age which froze the entire surface: known today as a Snowball Earth scenario. This disaster almost ended life on Earth entirely. Here’s the story of our planet’s near-death, culminating in life’s ultimate survival story…
For roughly 300 million years, the Earth was frozen: “What was it like when oxygen killed almost all life on Earth?” from @StartsWithABang in @bigthink. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice“
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As we contemplate change, we might send chilly birthday greetings to Raoul Pictet; he was born on this date in 1846. Remembered as a pioneer in cryogenics, Pictet was a Swiss chemist who spent much of his career trying to produce very low temperatures (in order to produce ice for refrigeration)– which led him to the creation of liquid oxygen in 1877 (for which he’s credited as co-discoverer, as French scientist Louis-Paul Cailletet, working completely separately, also produced liquid oxygen that year).
“No great thing is created suddenly… If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”*
What is true of many blessings is also, Andrew Dessler explains, true of many curses…
If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.
In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.
But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event [as pictured above], for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.
As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.
Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.
The key to this is recognizing the thresholds that exist in the systems around us. For example, when engineers of the 20th century designed the infrastructure that we live with today (bridges, dams, storm runoff systems), they designed it for the range of climate conditions that existed at the time, adding in a small margin for unforeseen weather extremities. But not too much of a margin — they wanted to keep costs down.
…
The speed of us passing limits is mind bending. People who are impacted are often shocked and we frequently see people bemoaning the fact that some impact never happened before — this is the calling card of non-linear effects…
Rain, snow, wind, heat– we’re living in a non-linear world: “Why are climate impacts escalating so quickly?“, from @AndrewDessler.
* Epictetus
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As we steel ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that Hurricane Camille, the 2nd most intense and one of only four Category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the continental U.S., came ashore along the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Waveland, MS.
“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.”*…
The Trump administration released a report that predicted global temperatures will be four degrees higher by the end of this century, assuming current trends persist. World leaders have pledged to keep global temperatures from rising even two degrees (Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, with the understanding that warming beyond that could prove catastrophic. The last time the Earth was as warm as the White House expects it to be in 2100, its oceans were hundreds of feet higher. Which is to say: The Trump administration ostensibly, officially expects that, absent radical action to reduce carbon emissions, within the next 80 years, much of Manhattan and Miami will sink into the sea; many of world’s coral reefs will be irreversibly destroyed by acidifying oceans; vast regions of the Earth will lose their primary sources of water; and a variety of extreme weather events will dramatically increase in frequency.
And the White House believes that this fact is an argument for loosening restrictions on carbon emissions… the administration uses its four-degree warming estimate to argue that eliminating 8 billion tons worth of emissions won’t be enough to change the climate outlook, by itself, so the federal government shouldn’t bother…
This argument is deplorable in its nihilism. But its core assumption is also patently absurd. The administration’s analysis is premised on the notion that there is no relationship between what the United States does with regard to climate regulation, and what the rest of the world’s countries do. Which is totally bogus: Not only can the U.S. lead by example, it also has the power to coerce other countries into emulating the carbon standards we set for ourselves…
That said, if one assumes that the entire leadership of the Republican Party has concluded that human civilization will not survive Barron Trump, then their governing agenda starts to make a lot more sense. Exacerbating inequality and subordinating the commons to short-term profit maximization isn’t in the enlightened medium-term interests of the GOP donor class — but in the medium-term, we’ll all (apparently) be dead!
The whole sad story in full: “The Trump Administration Anticipates Catastrophic Global Warming by 2100.”
* Margaret Atwood
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As we we recall, with Marshall McLuhan, that there are no passengers on Spaceship Earth, only crew, we might take a celebratory trip in honor of Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer and anthropologist who became famous for his Kon-Tiki Expedition in 1947 (though he went on many others as well); he was born on this date in 1914… He once responded to an interviewer, “Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of most people.”
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