It also means that scientists and other experts are going to have to monitor measures other than just atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases to catch catastrophic climate change developing. "It is essential that we designate the harbingers of abrupt and significant changes or, perhaps more importantly, the triggers and thresholds that could commit the planet to these changes well before their tell-tale signs appear," says economist and IPCC author Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "We cannot accept the adaptive design completely without having confidence in our abilities to determine exactly what to monitor."
The IPCC has taken a crack at that, identifying 26 "key vulnerabilities" in its most recent assessment, ranging from declines in agricultural productivity to the melting of ice sheets and polar ice cover as well as determining how to judge if they are spiraling out of control. Disappearing Arctic ice is already helping to amplify global warming beyond what the IPCC had predicted in the past. "We already know about as much as we are going to about climate system's response to greenhouse gases," Roe says. "We already have the basis for making the decisions we need to make."
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4 Comments
Add CommentThis situation reminds me of Micky Mouse in Fantasia, Remember, he could not stop the brooms from moving the water any more then we can understand what we are doing to the earth! All 7 billion of us!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis situation (not the article) of when Micky Mouse, in fantasia, tries to stop the brooms from bring in the water, after he had just trained the brooms to bring in the water. What is it we want from the earth?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only thing certain is that the climate will change. The main greenhouse gas is water vapor not CO2. As I have mentioned in the past, an easy way to cool the earth is to start a volcano. I also wan to state that panels voting on climate change have no physical effect on the climate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt first it sounded like Roe was siting chaos theory
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"small changes in various physical processes that control climate lead to big results"
Very misleading since weather and climate are based on chaos theory. However, under chaos theory processes are very sensitive at the initial state and can lead to variations over time that are unpredictable. Roe is actually saying that it is predictable since small changes will lead to "big results". Chaos theory shows us that it is unpredictable so that it could be either way.
I would also like to point at an alternative point of view from a previous Scientific American article
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic&page=3
The uncertainty lies in both the data about past climate and the models that project future climate. Curry asserts that scientists haven’t adequately dealt with the uncertainty in their calculations and don’t even know with precision what’s arguably the most basic number in the field: the climate forcing from CO2—that is, the amount of warming a doubling of CO2 alone would cause without any amplifying or mitigating effects from melting ice, increased water vapor or any of a dozen other factors.
Things get worse, she argues, when you try to add in those feedbacks to project likely temperature increases over the next century, because the feedbacks are rife with uncertainty as well: “There’s a whole host of unknown unknowns that we don’t even know how to quantify but that should be factored into our confidence level.” One example she cites is the “hockey stick” chart showing that current temperatures are the warmest in hundreds of years. If you are going to say that this year or that decade is the hottest, you had better have a good idea of what temperatures have actually been over those hundreds of years—and Curry, along with many skeptics, does not think we have as good a handle on that as the scientific community believes.