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Texas had a blizzard because the polar vortex dropped down from the Arctic due to record warming[1] Climate change is going to make things weird. Not everyone

Texas had a blizzard because the polar vortex dropped down from the Arctic due to record warming[1] Climate change is going to make things weird. Not everyone is going to get warmer. Some models show Europe entering an Ice Age due to a slow down of the gulf stream. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-warming-arctic-helped-drive-a-deep-freeze-into-texas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-w...

chrisco255 5y ago
Models are not effective at predicting weather outcomes even four weeks into the future. In non-linear dynamic systems, uncertainty is an exponential function of time. If some models show europe getting colder and some models show europe getting warmer, what are we doing except covering all possibilities? How do you distinguish which model is the most accurate one? For example, I was told from a young age, global warming is going to cause the ice caps to melt, and yet: The arctic sea ice volume is at 30 year median this summer: http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickness-and-volume/ http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickn... And Greenland is having an anamolously cold summer, gaining in ice instead of losing ice as it normally does to summer melt: http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ And Antarctic sea ice is above average: https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/ https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentr...
- adrianN 5y ago
  Don't you think that the scientists who literally dedicate their life to understanding the climate are aware of the difficulties and have developed methods to get useful predictions out of ensembles of models? The predictions used for example in the IPCC reports get their error bars at least in part from the disagreement of the different models. Regarding sea ice: I think a temporary increase is not unexpected. As ice melts the salinity of the ocean goes down, which makes it freeze a bit easier.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  That is some nice cherry picking. Similar to how the Texas blizzard worked, the Greenland surface conditions are a result of the heat dome. From your own source[1]. I will be the first to admit that claiming the Texas Blizzard and the Heat dome were both directly due to climate change is a little disingenuous. But these things are definitely not normal, and one impact of climate change is that we will be getting a lot more chaos similar to these recent events. And regrading your concerns about the modeling. I agree, the uncertainty is real and quite frankly that should scare you and everyone else. There is simply no way for humans to fully understand all of the different mechanisms at play. We are entering uncharted territory. We might get lucky and some dampening feedback emerges that we did not account for that moderates the climate impacts. Or we might get very unlucky and kick off a mechanism that results in our oceans boiling off killing all life. Most likely, we will end up somewhere in the middle of those two extremes and it will take quite a while before we get there. But once again, the uncertainty is massive. So we are essentially rolling the dice on the future of humanity all so a handful of fossil fuel executives can continue to line their pockets. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/PolarPortal/status/1411280517316612103 https://mobile.twitter.com/PolarPortal/status/14112805173166...
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    I'm not cherry picking July 12th. Temperature anomaly maps like what they're showing there on Twitter are highly variable and flux a great deal. See [1] for example and hit play. I'm talking about the entire summer ice gain in Greenland for 2021. The heat dome was a fleeting thing and the summer ice gains have been registering even in June and have continued even as the heat dome as subsided. There is no scenario where 400ppm CO2 has ever led to any of the extreme events you are casually throwing out there as realistic possibilities. We have geological evidence of Earth's CO2 concentration and climate history going back 500 million years. We know it was close to 7000 ppm during the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago. We know it was in the thousands of ppm for most of life's existence on this planet. We know the oceans didn't boil off. What we know from geology is that not only is the planet extremely antifragile, life itself is as well and always adapts to the always changing climate. Nature has thrown many curve balls, including Laschamp events that caused the Earth's magnetic field to flip for a few hundred years, which led to mass extinctions in the southern hemisphere and some say, the end of the Neanderthals [2]. Or more recently, the Younger Dryas 12 thousand years ago, where temps returned to ice age levels before rapidly warming to above modern day levels [3], and also caused mass extinctions of many animals including wooly mammoths, American lions, saber tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and so much more [3]. And those two events happened with CO2 levels at less than half of what they are today. Of course, we wouldn't ever want CO2 levels to go below 150ppm, because at that level photosynthesis is not possible and all plant life chokes and dies (happens much earlier than that for higher elevation). Thankfully that Younger Dryas episode, whatever caused it, we still don't fully understand it...subsided, CO2 levels rose back up with the warming temps to the Holocene optimum levels, that led to favorable conditions for civilization to flourish and for agriculture to take off. We're still in an ice age, and we'll return to a glacial period once again, because volcanoes are ultimately in control of that process. We got a preview of that in 1816, the famous "year without a summer". Our job as humans is to adapt to whatever nature throws at us. [1] https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&region=namer&pkg=T850a&runtime=2021071500&fh=6 https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&r... [2] https://techthoroughfare.com/earth/laschamps-excursion-mass-extinctions-42000-years-ago/ https://techthoroughfare.com/earth/laschamps-excursion-mass-... [3] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/historictemperaturerecord_greenland_large.jpg https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/historictemperat... [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

chrisco255 5y ago

Models are not effective at predicting weather outcomes even four weeks into the future. In non-linear dynamic systems, uncertainty is an exponential function of time. If some models show europe getting colder and some models show europe getting warmer, what are we doing except covering all possibilities? How do you distinguish which model is the most accurate one? For example, I was told from a young age, global warming is going to cause the ice caps to melt, and yet: The arctic sea ice volume is at 30 year median this summer: http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickness-and-volume/ http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-thickn... And Greenland is having an anamolously cold summer, gaining in ice instead of losing ice as it normally does to summer melt: http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/ And Antarctic sea ice is above average: https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/ https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentr...

adrianN 5y ago
Don't you think that the scientists who literally dedicate their life to understanding the climate are aware of the difficulties and have developed methods to get useful predictions out of ensembles of models? The predictions used for example in the IPCC reports get their error bars at least in part from the disagreement of the different models. Regarding sea ice: I think a temporary increase is not unexpected. As ice melts the salinity of the ocean goes down, which makes it freeze a bit easier.
qqqwerty 5y ago
That is some nice cherry picking. Similar to how the Texas blizzard worked, the Greenland surface conditions are a result of the heat dome. From your own source[1]. I will be the first to admit that claiming the Texas Blizzard and the Heat dome were both directly due to climate change is a little disingenuous. But these things are definitely not normal, and one impact of climate change is that we will be getting a lot more chaos similar to these recent events. And regrading your concerns about the modeling. I agree, the uncertainty is real and quite frankly that should scare you and everyone else. There is simply no way for humans to fully understand all of the different mechanisms at play. We are entering uncharted territory. We might get lucky and some dampening feedback emerges that we did not account for that moderates the climate impacts. Or we might get very unlucky and kick off a mechanism that results in our oceans boiling off killing all life. Most likely, we will end up somewhere in the middle of those two extremes and it will take quite a while before we get there. But once again, the uncertainty is massive. So we are essentially rolling the dice on the future of humanity all so a handful of fossil fuel executives can continue to line their pockets. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/PolarPortal/status/1411280517316612103 https://mobile.twitter.com/PolarPortal/status/14112805173166...
- chrisco255 5y ago
  I'm not cherry picking July 12th. Temperature anomaly maps like what they're showing there on Twitter are highly variable and flux a great deal. See [1] for example and hit play. I'm talking about the entire summer ice gain in Greenland for 2021. The heat dome was a fleeting thing and the summer ice gains have been registering even in June and have continued even as the heat dome as subsided. There is no scenario where 400ppm CO2 has ever led to any of the extreme events you are casually throwing out there as realistic possibilities. We have geological evidence of Earth's CO2 concentration and climate history going back 500 million years. We know it was close to 7000 ppm during the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago. We know it was in the thousands of ppm for most of life's existence on this planet. We know the oceans didn't boil off. What we know from geology is that not only is the planet extremely antifragile, life itself is as well and always adapts to the always changing climate. Nature has thrown many curve balls, including Laschamp events that caused the Earth's magnetic field to flip for a few hundred years, which led to mass extinctions in the southern hemisphere and some say, the end of the Neanderthals [2]. Or more recently, the Younger Dryas 12 thousand years ago, where temps returned to ice age levels before rapidly warming to above modern day levels [3], and also caused mass extinctions of many animals including wooly mammoths, American lions, saber tooth cats, giant ground sloths, and so much more [3]. And those two events happened with CO2 levels at less than half of what they are today. Of course, we wouldn't ever want CO2 levels to go below 150ppm, because at that level photosynthesis is not possible and all plant life chokes and dies (happens much earlier than that for higher elevation). Thankfully that Younger Dryas episode, whatever caused it, we still don't fully understand it...subsided, CO2 levels rose back up with the warming temps to the Holocene optimum levels, that led to favorable conditions for civilization to flourish and for agriculture to take off. We're still in an ice age, and we'll return to a glacial period once again, because volcanoes are ultimately in control of that process. We got a preview of that in 1816, the famous "year without a summer". Our job as humans is to adapt to whatever nature throws at us. [1] https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&region=namer&pkg=T850a&runtime=2021071500&fh=6 https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&r... [2] https://techthoroughfare.com/earth/laschamps-excursion-mass-extinctions-42000-years-ago/ https://techthoroughfare.com/earth/laschamps-excursion-mass-... [3] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/historictemperaturerecord_greenland_large.jpg https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/historictemperat... [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer