Comment by defrost
7 months ago
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.