Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'.
Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry.
After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology.
In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne.
In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract.
Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'.
Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe.
As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.
Added comment: The authors seem to take the IPCC’s complacent assumptions that reaching zero emissions will be enough to solve the climate crisis. There are strong reasons for thinking the situation is actually far more serious – multiply emphasizing their conclusion that the Canadian Parliament must recognize the need to mount a global war effort if our species is to survive.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Part 2 of David Spratt’s guide-book to events along the road to Hothouse Hell: collapse of the West-Antarctic Ice Sheet
This post continues David Spratt’s account of how we humans seem to be passing critical tipping points in the dynamics of Earth’s Climate System initiating the positive feedbacks of runaway global warming to Earth’s Hothouse Hell. Steffen et al. described the dynamics and existential consequences of this process in their 2018 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. The feature graphic above from that paper maps out alternative destinations we can reach from where we are now. There are two roads,
a wide easy one leading to the cliff of no return, where we can no longer stop Earth’s runaway warming to global average temperatures 10 – 15 °C hotter than present that will be lethal to most species of complex organisms, and
an already hard to reach path where we climb back up the hill through effective “stewardship” (Steffen et al’s word), and reverse the warming process to stabilize the climate system in a way that will give humans and what remains of a probably already tattered biosphere a long term future.
Thanks to the technologies we began developing in the Industrial Revolution we have fueled our endless competition with one-another to control our one world with the increasingly profligate burning of fossil carbon to increase greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Rising temperatures are then initiating a variety of other temperature-related positive-feedback processes emitting more greenhouse gases or having other effects to increase the rate of temperate rise that has started us down the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell.
When the positive feedback reaches a point where it can sustain further temperature increases, it can be said that it has passed a tipping point, that may begin a rapid cascade of further tipping points as described in Lenton et al’s 2019 comment paper in Nature, Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. There is no evidence that anything other than a rapidly mobilized war effort by humans will be able to stop the cascade passing the point of no return to runaway warming and global mass extinction. If we want to leave a future to our children and grandchildren, we had better pay heed to the warning signs that Spratt is pointing out, and start mobilizing and acting now.
Where Thwaits Glacier meets the Antarctic Ocean
20 January 2022
Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (2) West Antarctica and the “doomsday” glacier
The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has an eastern ice shelf 45 kilometres wide as it flows into the Amundsen Sea. On 13 December 2021, scientists announced that the ice shelf is likely to break apart in the next five years or so, resulting in a speeding up of the glacier’s flow and ice discharge, possibly heralding the collapse of the glacier itself, and triggering similar increases across the Amundsen Sea glaciers.
The researchers explain: “Over the last several years, satellite radar imagery shows many new fractures opening up… which like a growing crack in the windshield of a car [can] suddenly break apart into hundreds of panes of glass. We have mapped [the] pathway the fractures might take through the ice [and conclude] the final collapse of Thwaites Glacier’s last remaining ice shelf may be initiated … within as little as five years” (emphasis added).
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The fracturing of the ice shelf means more warm water will penetrate under the ice sheet, helping to free the underbelly of the glacier from the grounding line rock underneath, and allowing water to flow into the deep basin under the glacier, causing the glacier’s collapse. This would raise sea levels by 65 centimetres, though the timing of such collapse — the “doomsday” scenario — is highly uncertain. Since neighbouring glaciers flow into the same basin, the demise of Thwaites could eventually lead to the loss of all of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), resulting in more than three metres of sea level rise, and putting at risk the lives and livelihoods of 250 million people.
There is no doubt that observable and understandable evidence from the real world that Spratt, I and others point out is telling us that we are on the road to Earth’s Hothouse Hell and the current climate emergency is already dire and getting worse. In the face of this truly existential crisis, Australia is governed by Captain Humbug’s LNP COALition. Based on watching and listening to them in action, they are a troop of wooden-headed puppets, charlatans, knaves and pathological liars.
Their COALition’s focus in Parliament seems to be protecting the special interests of their patrons in the greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuel industries and related exploiters of Australia’s resources. Beginning with the holier than thou Abbott and currently led by Capt. Humbug (Scotty from marketing) and Blarney Bulldust (the man with the hat), as long as the COALition has been in government, their constant flow of humbug, legislative blocking, denial, disinformation, disruption, distraction etc., has effectively protected their patrons by stifling the mobilization of any real action on the climate emergency (e.g.., stopping GHG emissions cold).
Vote Climate One understands and accepts the real world evidence that humanity faces a genuinely existential crisis: we’ll soon become extinct if we do not stop and reverse global warming. Our group was formed with the single goal – to create some hope for the future by helping the Australian people remove Capt. Humbug and his nasty and evil troop from our Federal Parliament by replacing the puppets and knaves with honest parties and individuals who have convinced us that they can be trusted to place acting on climate change as their first order of business in Parliament.
Systems thinking helps make sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships. Mella thinks this will help us navigate through the complexity to working solutions
Australia has a large and potentially quite capable academic and institutional infrastructure for understanding and developing solutions for climate problems. However, given the unique and complex nature of Earth’s Climate System and the rapid changes that are taking place the usual reductionist approaches of normal science are unlikely to find a navigable pathway through the problems. A more holistic systems thinking approach helps to identify and map out the major areas and levels of organization where problems need to be solved. Systems engineers are a lot more comfortable working this way than are ‘normal’ scientists. Teams integrating both normal science and systems engineering should be able to navigate the rapidly changing shoals to bring escalating problem situations under control.
Unfortunately, Australia’s current LNP COALition Governments primary aim in power seems to be preventing any action on climate change that might impair their patrons in the fossil fuel and related industries. The resulting humbug, denial, disinformation, distraction and outright blocking and withdrawal of support for high level climate science has effectively stifled any significant progress towards solving the climate emergency. The fact that certain elements of the (mostly Murdoch) press also continue polluting the press and social media with all kinds of fake news, alternative facts and blather, works further to hide the lack of serious progress towards doing anything effective about the climate emergency.
Social alarm and the removal–consumption–production strategy.To highlight the components of this strategy, it is useful to group the multiple specific levers that can be implemented by different governments into only three macro-levers of control, indicated in the box on the left-hand side of the model
Abstract: For some time, there has been a slow but gradual rise in the average temperature of the entire globe, a “global warming”, in fact, the result of human and natural processes that have been producing this phenomenon for decades. Since they are not directly perceived by individuals, these processes and their effects have been ignored for a long time, or at least not considered to be immediately harmful and dangerous.
Global warming does not depend so much on solar radiation as it does on the greenhouse effect deriving from the continuous emission, by human activities and natural events, of greenhouse gases that accumulate in the atmosphere and form a barrier to the dispersion of heat produced by solar radiation. A good number of models exists to explain how global warming is produced, which are technical in nature and consider the production of greenhouse gases as the most important cause; however, they do not always analyze and justify the reasons for such emissions.
Following the logic, language and methods of Senge’s systems thinking, the paper aims to present a general model, the GEAM—qualitative in nature, but rational and coherent—for highlighting the interacting factors that give rise to and maintain global warming. This model constitutes a reference framework to identify possible “strategic areas” within which to identify man-made “artificial” and “natural” factors that can control the phenomenon and to order the countless ideas and interventions that different nations carry out individually to control global warming.
What Mella outlines in his article should not be that difficult to implement – particularly if supported by a government that puts a high priority on acting on the climate emergency. Clearly, re-electing the LNP COALition will not provide that kind of support. If were are to leave a planet capable of providing a long-term future for our children and grandchildren we must replace the COALition fossil fuel industry puppets with trustworthy people who have committed themselves to put solving the climate emergency as their first order of business if elected.
To help you do this, the Vote Climate One group will provide Traffic Light Voting guides for every Federal Electorate that will help you preference candidates in an order that should avoid the risk that your most preferred candidates preferences will not flow to the fossil fuel puppets if they are not elected. We don’t tell you how to vote, but you will know that any candidate designated with a green light has convinced us that they will put action on the climate emergency as their first priority in Parliament. Amber light candidates might have other first priorities, but we think they can be counted on to cooperate with action on the emergency.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Added comment: Good review of how to reduce battery costs costs for electrifying fossil fuel driven private transport. Not discussed here is that the fabrication of private vehicles consumes way more resources than just what is required for the power train. If we are serious about stopping and reversing global warming we will need to do more than just stop carbon emissions. Major savings on all sorts of resource requirements can be made by replacing private vehicles with electric bicycles and public transport and delivery. A good project for someone who is good with numbers would be to calculate the global footprint required to produce a private car for a person/family vs how many people/families without a private car could occupy that same footprint.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
