Comment by defrost
7 months ago
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with the original text - but it contains NO maybes.
BurningFrog hasn't correctly read it and is arguing against a strawmanned version of it (it may be incorrect for other reasons).
The original: https://www.space.com/climate-tipping-points-closer-than-rea...
states (correctly or not):
Climate tipping points — the "points of no return" past which key components of Earth's climate will begin to irreversibly break down — could be triggered by much lower temperatures than scientists previously thought, with some tipping points potentially already reached. There are also many more potential tipping points than scientists previously identified, according to a new study.
In English as a first language that's an assertion that
* Climate tipping points [...] could be triggered by much lower temperatures than scientists previously thought
implying that they are real and will hapen at some threshold but there is now evidence or a model that suggets the thresholds may be lower than once thought.
The incorrect interpretation by BurningFrog above was that
> that this [ Climate tipping points ] may possibly happen, not that it will!
whereas the text (again, correct or not) was definite that Climate tipping points are real and will happen when thresholds are crossed.
The only "maybe" was a suspicion that these thresholds could be even lower than thought and a Rubicon may have been crossed already - but there was zero uncertainity expressed wrt existence and potential to be crossed.
> the incorrect interpretation by BurningFrog above was that
>> that this [ Climate tipping points ] may possibly happen, not that it will!
> whereas the text (again, correct or not) was definite that Climate tipping points are real and will happen when thresholds are crossed.
It will happen IF thresholds are crossed. And crucially, we don't know where the thresholds are. So it could happen.
"The Empire State Building WILL fall over WHEN it tips beyond some threshold" is not saying that it will fall over, means that it could fall over. And yes, also in this case the threshold is real.
We know that critical parameters are climbing, we know that (for example) CO2 sequestration is not happening nor planned to occur at a scale that matches the century of industry that put the CO2 out there.
It's a physical fact that once thresholds are reached then irreversible problems occur.
> The Empire State Building WILL fall over WHEN it tips beyond some threshold
Not a good example as the Empire State Building isn't tipping.
The insulation in the atmospheres is (by contrast) increasing.
The specific skepticism expressed in BurningFrog comment above based on an incorrect reading of the text was unwarrented, a more geneneral dbate about the specifics of models, etc. is still in play.
> Not a good example as the Empire State Building isn't tipping.
Sorry but I have to insist: the tipping points of the ESB are real, it will fall over if it leans above a certain threshold, and the threshold could be lower than we think.
This statement is trivially true and yet it tells you nothing about the current state of the ESB.
Note: I am not saying that I don't believe climate change is happening, or that we should not be worried about it, or even that tipping points are a fiction. But I agree with BurningFrog that these statements are full of hypotheticals and that they seem to say more than they actually do- exactly like the statement about the ESB. There is an obvious incentive for publishing results that attract attention and nothing attracts attention more than prophecies of doom; this is in addition to the normal publication bias of non-neutral results. We have a replication crisis in actual experimental disciplines- where the papers detail what experiments were made and how to replicate them; but much of climate science is a speculative science that operates on models and extrapolations. And, differently from say, medicine, there is an actual political side to these results that muddies things even more- we want to see results that confirm our current opinion. This should makes us doubly careful on the topic.