http://www.ambitgambit.com/2009/04/04/r-u-non-linear/ Ambit Gambit Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:01:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.ambitgambit.com/2009/04/04/r-u-non-linear/comment-page-1/#comment-3064 Q&A Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:08:09 +0000 http://localhost/ambit/?p=3521#comment-3064 Ronda, I do what I can where and when I can. However, my optimism is tempered by the, um, er ... ‘human condition’. This in itself I can come to terms with. What I find sickeningly abhorrent is that through humanity’s actions (and inaction), we as a species will have such an adverse impact on the future environment and its biodiversity. I too have had musings, on the four horsemen of the apocalypse ... isn’t Graham’s OLO great! He and his team deserve kudos, especially in this special anniversary year. Cheers qanda Ronda, I do what I can where and when I can. However, my optimism is tempered by the, um, er … ‘human condition’. This in itself I can come to terms with. What I find sickeningly abhorrent is that through humanity’s actions (and inaction), we as a species will have such an adverse impact on the future environment and its biodiversity.
I too have had musings, on the four horsemen of the apocalypse … isn’t Graham’s OLO great! He and his team deserve kudos, especially in this special anniversary year.
Cheers
qanda

]]> http://www.ambitgambit.com/2009/04/04/r-u-non-linear/comment-page-1/#comment-3065 ronda jambe Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:24:58 +0000 http://localhost/ambit/?p=3521#comment-3065 Thank you for that detailed and dispassionate assessment. You have provided the scientific background that underlies my somewhat more nervous musings. I too fear a tipping point is near, or rather, that we have already passed several of them, yet our slumber continues. How much clearer can the signs be before we change course in the dramatic ways that are needed? Hanging on to our coal exports won't save us in the longer term, and not preparing for that reality will make it worse. Thank you for that detailed and dispassionate assessment. You have provided the scientific background that underlies my somewhat more nervous musings. I too fear a tipping point is near, or rather, that we have already passed several of them, yet our slumber continues. How much clearer can the signs be before we change course in the dramatic ways that are needed? Hanging on to our coal exports won’t save us in the longer term, and not preparing for that reality will make it worse.

]]> http://www.ambitgambit.com/2009/04/04/r-u-non-linear/comment-page-1/#comment-3066 Q&A Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:02:30 +0000 http://localhost/ambit/?p=3521#comment-3066 Hi Ronda, Although I am a scientist/engineer with both specific and general expertise in all things “water” (my research interest is land/ocean/atmosphere coupled systems), I would never claim to fully understand the complexities that regulate global climate patterns. Rather, I defer to the expertise of the vast majority of ‘climate scientists’ who do. I think their position is pretty unambiguous; the major driver of our current global warming stems from the combustion of fossil fuels (and other positive feedbacks associated with that) and misuse of our natural resources – we know this mainly from isotope and attribution studies. Put simply, humanity is pouring more carbon into the atmosphere than the oceans and terrestrial biosphere can absorb. This is what the ‘numbers’ are telling us. I know very few genuine scientists who take a different position, but the ones that do are the outliers. Nevertheless, science does not function by consensus and we are the most self-critical lot that one can imagine. In a very robust conference I was recently involved with, there were all kinds of hypotheses presented on global warming – with participants providing empirical support for some findings, and refuting others. I've learned that accepted hypotheses typically only emerge over large spatial and/or temporal scales. Look at the carbon, nitrogen or phosphorus cycles we learn about in school, for example. These cycles (until humans started disrupting them) were pretty stable over large expanses of the planet. It's the same with respect to climate. When someone claims that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a myth because they are having a cool summer in their part of the world, they are mistaking stochasticity (unpredictability over a short time frame) with determinism (predictable phenomena). In other words, weather is not climate. Really, we need to look for trends over more appropriate scales of space and time. This is what most climate researchers are telling us now. The global climate is largely deterministic, and it should take a major forcing to lead to the kinds of rapid changes that have occurred since about 1800, and even more rapid since the mid 1900’s. If you look at the ten years preceding the 1998 'spike' in temperature, and the ten following years to the present, a worrying pattern emerges. If we perform a simple linear regression, it becomes clear that GW (‘climate-change’ if you prefer) is a reality – notwithstanding all the brouhaha generated at the Heartland Institute’s latest gabfest. For such a deterministic system to have changed by 0.5 -0.7 degrees in the mere space of 30-50 years is quite exceptional, given the size of the system. Of course, some regional variations are much more extreme than that (the Arctic and West Antarctic for example, or even here in Oz). Drawing on your article, nature is generally pretty resilient and pliable when impacted by a suite of stresses, particularly over large time scales. However, let's be brutally honest here, humanity has pretty much been conducting an experiment on eco-systems that we barely understand. Eco-systems function in profoundly non-linear ways; thus the change in one minor component in the system (such as the introduction of an exotic species like cane toads, or interfering with the movement of pollinators and seed dispersers) has been shown to reverberate throughout the system and to have significantly negative effects on the functioning (and persistence) of the system. Ecologists would argue that their science is the most complex of the sciences (climatologists may disagree) because ecological systems function non-linearly. This means that we can alter and simplify systems considerably without noticing any kind of effects until there is a sudden and dramatic shift (tipping point if you like) and then it becomes too late to do anything about it. For the impacts from climate change, we may see things like more flooding, more salinity problems, more mosquitoes, less ice, less polar bears, more female turtles, etc. Some scientists are now worried about such “tipping points” as they relate to catastrophic climate change. What I can say about AGW is that we should expect surprises - big, nasty ones. Climate change is likely to exacerbate other stresses that humanity is inflicting on complex adaptive ecological systems across the biosphere. I for one don’t think it prudent to experiment on systems that sustain us to the breaking (or tipping) point. Therefore, until we better understand how these complex systems function, I believe that we (humanity) should tread carefully. Otherwise, what we are doing is crossing our fingers and hoping that technology will undo any of the problems that technology, and excess consumption amongst the privileged few, has caused in the first place. I have been confronted by sceptics who argue that we need 100% proof before any kind of mitigation should be considered. Without this proof, they claim that the 'problem does not exist, it is not that bad, or we can’t do anything about it'. I've faced this type of logic on issues such as diminishing water resources, drinking water quality, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Nevertheless, our understanding of the functioning of ecosystems or climate change science - given their immense complexity and the lack of enough people to study every subtle and not-so-subtle nuance in them - is in its infancy. To fully understand the effects of the human assault across the atmosphere, oceans and terrestrial biosphere would cost many billions of dollars – which will never be funded. We do have evidence of very worrying trends, which in my view, given the importance of the planet in sustaining us, should be enough to prompt swift action. But, against this background are those who “don’t want to believe” or who profit from 'business-as-usual', those who think about the next profit margin or election result. They are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo, irrespective of the costs to future generations who will inherit a biologically and ecologically impoverished world. The costs of continuing along this course are likely to be enormous. This future world will be more prone to environmental disasters, and everyone will suffer. Humanity should do everything in its power to ensure that this does not happen, this is risk management. The world must develop in a more environmentally sustainable way, all else follows. By the way, the vast body of experts are not ‘alarmists’ (although the message is alarming) – they tell it like it is; the messengers so to speak. What the policy makers, captains of industry and people in the street do with that message is up to them, but as we have seen from the so called ‘denialists’ on Graham Young’s OLO and other blog sites – some want to kill the messenger and trounce the message. This is why not many of us get embroiled in public forums (and if we do it is with some form of anonymity), we do have an otherwise normal life. Hi Ronda,
Although I am a scientist/engineer with both specific and general expertise in all things “water” (my research interest is land/ocean/atmosphere coupled systems), I would never claim to fully understand the complexities that regulate global climate patterns. Rather, I defer to the expertise of the vast majority of ‘climate scientists’ who do. I think their position is pretty unambiguous; the major driver of our current global warming stems from the combustion of fossil fuels (and other positive feedbacks associated with that) and misuse of our natural resources – we know this mainly from isotope and attribution studies. Put simply, humanity is pouring more carbon into the atmosphere than the oceans and terrestrial biosphere can absorb. This is what the ‘numbers’ are telling us.
I know very few genuine scientists who take a different position, but the ones that do are the outliers. Nevertheless, science does not function by consensus and we are the most self-critical lot that one can imagine. In a very robust conference I was recently involved with, there were all kinds of hypotheses presented on global warming – with participants providing empirical support for some findings, and refuting others.
I’ve learned that accepted hypotheses typically only emerge over large spatial and/or temporal scales. Look at the carbon, nitrogen or phosphorus cycles we learn about in school, for example. These cycles (until humans started disrupting them) were pretty stable over large expanses of the planet. It’s the same with respect to climate. When someone claims that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a myth because they are having a cool summer in their part of the world, they are mistaking stochasticity (unpredictability over a short time frame) with determinism (predictable phenomena). In other words, weather is not climate. Really, we need to look for trends over more appropriate scales of space and time.
This is what most climate researchers are telling us now. The global climate is largely deterministic, and it should take a major forcing to lead to the kinds of rapid changes that have occurred since about 1800, and even more rapid since the mid 1900’s. If you look at the ten years preceding the 1998 ‘spike’ in temperature, and the ten following years to the present, a worrying pattern emerges. If we perform a simple linear regression, it becomes clear that GW (‘climate-change’ if you prefer) is a reality – notwithstanding all the brouhaha generated at the Heartland Institute’s latest gabfest.
For such a deterministic system to have changed by 0.5 -0.7 degrees in the mere space of 30-50 years is quite exceptional, given the size of the system. Of course, some regional variations are much more extreme than that (the Arctic and West Antarctic for example, or even here in Oz).
Drawing on your article, nature is generally pretty resilient and pliable when impacted by a suite of stresses, particularly over large time scales. However, let’s be brutally honest here, humanity has pretty much been conducting an experiment on eco-systems that we barely understand. Eco-systems function in profoundly non-linear ways; thus the change in one minor component in the system (such as the introduction of an exotic species like cane toads, or interfering with the movement of pollinators and seed dispersers) has been shown to reverberate throughout the system and to have significantly negative effects on the functioning (and persistence) of the system.
Ecologists would argue that their science is the most complex of the sciences (climatologists may disagree) because ecological systems function non-linearly. This means that we can alter and simplify systems considerably without noticing any kind of effects until there is a sudden and dramatic shift (tipping point if you like) and then it becomes too late to do anything about it. For the impacts from climate change, we may see things like more flooding, more salinity problems, more mosquitoes, less ice, less polar bears, more female turtles, etc. Some scientists are now worried about such “tipping points” as they relate to catastrophic climate change.
What I can say about AGW is that we should expect surprises – big, nasty ones. Climate change is likely to exacerbate other stresses that humanity is inflicting on complex adaptive ecological systems across the biosphere. I for one don’t think it prudent to experiment on systems that sustain us to the breaking (or tipping) point. Therefore, until we better understand how these complex systems function, I believe that we (humanity) should tread carefully. Otherwise, what we are doing is crossing our fingers and hoping that technology will undo any of the problems that technology, and excess consumption amongst the privileged few, has caused in the first place.
I have been confronted by sceptics who argue that we need 100% proof before any kind of mitigation should be considered. Without this proof, they claim that the ‘problem does not exist, it is not that bad, or we can’t do anything about it’. I’ve faced this type of logic on issues such as diminishing water resources, drinking water quality, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Nevertheless, our understanding of the functioning of ecosystems or climate change science – given their immense complexity and the lack of enough people to study every subtle and not-so-subtle nuance in them – is in its infancy. To fully understand the effects of the human assault across the atmosphere, oceans and terrestrial biosphere would cost many billions of dollars – which will never be funded.
We do have evidence of very worrying trends, which in my view, given the importance of the planet in sustaining us, should be enough to prompt swift action. But, against this background are those who “don’t want to believe” or who profit from ‘business-as-usual’, those who think about the next profit margin or election result. They are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo, irrespective of the costs to future generations who will inherit a biologically and ecologically impoverished world. The costs of continuing along this course are likely to be enormous. This future world will be more prone to environmental disasters, and everyone will suffer. Humanity should do everything in its power to ensure that this does not happen, this is risk management. The world must develop in a more environmentally sustainable way, all else follows.
By the way, the vast body of experts are not ‘alarmists’ (although the message is alarming) – they tell it like it is; the messengers so to speak. What the policy makers, captains of industry and people in the street do with that message is up to them, but as we have seen from the so called ‘denialists’ on Graham Young’s OLO and other blog sites – some want to kill the messenger and trounce the message. This is why not many of us get embroiled in public forums (and if we do it is with some form of anonymity), we do have an otherwise normal life.

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