Article by Eric Worrell
Professor Matthew England from the University of New South Wales told Nine News Australia: “This is a big problem that we are all trying to solve.”
How far away is our planet from suffering the most catastrophic effects of climate change?
By Daniel Jeffery July 30, 2024 12:34 pm
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How many more years will it take before we stop climate change?
Rather than talking about whether climate change can be stopped, it is more helpful to look at key “tipping points.”
“(These) include ice sheet collapse, melting permafrost, ocean deoxygenation, ocean acidification, the death of the Amazon rainforest, and changes in ocean circulation, such as the slowdown of the Atlantic Overturning Circulation,” said the director of the Center for Climate Change Research at the University of New South Wales. Katrin Meissner told 9news.com.au.
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So how close are we to hitting them?
Professor Matthew England from the University of New South Wales told Nine News Australia: “This is a big problem that we are all trying to solve.”
“In a way, this is our biggest unknown.
“It’s safe to say that we know these tipping points exist. What we don’t quite understand is how close we are to the tipping points.
“For example, some say we've passed the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet.”
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“On human-relevant time scales, all the effects we are seeing now are irreversible, even those unrelated to tipping points,” Meissner said.
“They can only maintain the status quo or it will get worse”
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Find out more: https://www.9news.com.au/national/climate-change-progress-how-long-until-climate-change-is-irreversible/87a22a09-2420-44af-b243-f60280531766
The big question I want to determine is whether these people are actually practicing science.
In science, prediction is king—if your theory doesn't make testable predictions, then it's not scientific.
Falsifiability (or rebuttability) is a deductive criterion for evaluating scientific theories and hypotheses proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his work The logic of scientific discovery (1934).[B] a theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or rebuttable)if you can logically Contradictory to empirical testing.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Like the idea that all ice caps will one day melt – Earth's paleoclimate history is filled with periods of melting polar ice caps. The polar ice caps were absent for most of Earth's history, and the world today is experiencing a period of extreme cold by paleoclimate standards.
from NOAA;
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This ice age occurred during the Pleistocene Epoch, beginning approximately 2.6 million years ago and lasting until approximately 11,000 years ago.
Like other ice ages, the most recent one brought a series of advances and retreats of glaciers. Actually, Technically, we are still in an ice age. We just live out our lives in interglacial periods.
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Learn more: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-coldest-earths-ever-been
But sayings like “They can only maintain the status quo or it will get worse.” Suggesting that things are getting worse – but not giving us a way to falsify this hypothesis.
In my view, making predictions that cannot be fundamentally tested violates the fundamental principles of science. If your prediction of an impending disaster doesn’t have a clear timeline, If it cannot be disproven through scientific testing, then it is not science.
A prediction like “The ice caps will melt by 2030, catastrophically flooding $100 billion worth of real estate,” would be a testable prediction. All we have to do is wait until 2030, point our fingers, and laugh.
What’s more, we can use such projections as a yardstick for measuring the comparative value of proposed climate actions. Should people living at high altitude be taxed a trillion dollars to pay for $100 billion to alleviate a problem that only affects wealthy, high-income lowland areas? Perhaps cities allegedly at risk should decide for themselves how trustworthy these predictions are and pay for their own climate adaptation.
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