Why show me this, if I am past all hope?

Speaking of hope, or lack thereof, Professor Joe remains ever hopeful.

Yes, it is increasingly unlikely that we will stabilize at 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and then quickly come back to 350. But when reporters ask me if it’s “too late,” — or, as one did last week, “have we crossed a tipping point?” — I have to explain that the question doesn’t have a purely scientific answer.

For if humanity gets truly serious about emissions reduction — and by serious I mean “World War II serious” in both scale and urgency — we could go to near zero global emissions in, say, 2 decades and then quickly go carbon negative. It wouldn’t be easy, far from it (see “How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution“).

Well, kudos to the reporter that knew to ask about a tipping point. The response this cynical blog would have preferred Professor Joe give is to ask, “To which tipping point do you refer?”

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This entry was written by jcwinnie, posted on 2010-12-28 at 10:23 am, filed under climate, complexity, denial, forecast, hope, risk, world and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. jcwinnie
    Posted 2010-12-28 at 11:30 am | Permalink

    Modeling systems are incredibly helpful for anticipating the effects of everything from weather to policy decisions on the environment and human populations. They can simulate what might happen when a storm hits a coastline or a new farming policy is enacted that could impact ground water. Typically modeling systems are specific to topics or geographic areas. Now, a group of researchers are trying to up the ante by creating a simulator that will replicate everything happening on the entire planet, including weather, diseases and economies.

    The BBC reports that the Living Earth Simulator (LES) is a project to improve the understanding of how human and environmental actions shape the world. By combining knowledge about everything from financial institutions to agriculture to weather to migration, the scientists feel we can finally form a more complete understanding about how everything interacts. Much of the emphasis is on finding a deeper understanding of how societies function, which would provide insight into things like the spread of diseases, impending financial problems, or even methods for combating climate change.

    The concept is there, but the actual system is not. The scientists need to gather essentially all the information we have so far about the planet’s functions and human interactions, as well as build supercomputers on a scale yet to be seen. The supercomputers would also have to be intelligent enough not just to compute data, but to understand it — for instance, how do air pollution data, traffic data, and weather data interact to create a picture of global atmospheric conditions? It is a lot of information, to be compiled by computers yet to be built, so we’re probably a long time away from having a full-planet simulator.

    As noted by BBC, “If you look at the data-processing capacity of Google, it’s clear that the LES won’t be held back by processing capacity, says Pete Warden, founder of the OpenHeatMap project and a specialist on data analysis…If you accept that only a fraction of the ‘several hundred exabytes of data being produced worldwide every year… would be useful for a world simulation, the bottleneck won’t be the processing capacity,’ says Mr Warden.”

    Rather, it’s getting the information itself and knowing what to do with it — and actually taking action once we have answers about cause and effect.

    “It’s not that we don’t know enough about a lot of the problems the world faces, from climate change to extreme poverty, it’s that we don’t take any action on the information we do have,” he argues.

    We can have all the simulators in the world telling us that emissions from transportation and electricity generation are causing a shift in the atmosphere so profound that life as we know it is headed for a dramatic change, yet that doesn’t seem to get most people out of their cars or turning off lights. A super-simulator like LES could be an incredible breakthrough for understanding human behavior, but it doesn’t mean it’s change said behavior.

  2. jcwinnie
    Posted 2010-12-30 at 12:36 pm | Permalink

    While the LES may represent a breakthrough in climate modeling, the magnitude of the crises we face, the scale at which they unfold and their interconnectedness call for different thinking. The alternative, quite possibly, is extinction.

  3. jcwinnie
    Posted 2010-12-30 at 12:55 pm | Permalink

    Any semblance of FuturICT to Deep Thought is entirely too eerie, Douglas.

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