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From The Columbia Climate School comes a state of the climate report on 18 October 2023. The title: When It Comes to Climate, Embrace Chaos, Says a Physicist. Here’s the lede: “Thirty-six years ago, a fierce storm hit England and France, killing at least 22 people and causing over $35 billion in damages.”
Never mind that proper grammar would have that last phrase read “more than $35 billion in damages,” rather than “over $35 billion in damages.” The paragraph goes on: “A few days later, the global stock market tanked, with the Dow Jones dropping 22.6% in one day. Both events were poorly predicted by current experts. However, the storm led to the development of a new type of prediction system called ensemble prediction. According to climate physicist Tim Palmer, who was instrumental in developing ensemble prediction, economists could benefit from the development of similar types of systems for predicting intermittent instabilities in the global economic system.”
As an aside, ensemble prediction is the approach used by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, USA. It is proving superior to the use of a linear projection, as was used in a peer-reviewed paper published in the renowned Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences on 8 March 2012. After incorrectly projecting an ice-free Arctic Ocean in 2016 plus or minus 3 years, a research team directed by the same Professor who led the previous effort now uses a 6-month ensemble forecast to predict—rather than project—an ice-free Arctic Ocean.
According to the Columbia Climate School article, physicist Tim Palmer—a professor at the University of Oxford—claims that chaos theory is, along with quantum mechanics and the theory of relatively, one of the three greatest theories in 20th century physics. When it comes to the future of Earth, Palmer claims we need to embrace chaos and therefore greatly increase the funding we spend on his favorite topic. This is hardly extraordinary for a scientist.
Palmer’s bottom line in the Columbia Climate School article is that we need to try climate modeling like we treat particle physics. We need to greatly increase the funding for climate modeling much like we do for particle physics with CERN. An institution founded in 1952, CERN is the multinational particle-physics endeavor dedicated to probing the fundamental structure of the universe. The CERN laboratory sits along the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It is often called the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and it now has 22 member states. The acronym CERN is from the French for European Council for Nuclear Research.
I agree with much of this article published by the Columbia Climate School, and certainly with the idea that more money must be dedicated to important research. However, I think we can do better than embracing chaos. For example, we can embrace the ongoing loss of habitat. Earth is rapidly losing habitat for human animals. Habitat for Homo sapiens certainly will be gone from this planet in considerably less time than the 50 to 100 years mentioned in the article from the Columbia Climate School.
What can we do? We can tell the full truth. We can inform people that we depend upon habitat for our survival. We can tell people that habitat is rapidly disappearing from the only planet known with certainly to support complex life forms. We all have the right to know that our time is short.
Thank you Guy. Be well.
“Thirty-six years ago, a fierce storm hit England and France, killing at least 22 people and causing over $35 billion in damages.”
Five years ago, I wrote an article titled, "The Insurance Industry, soon to be the first pillar of Capitalism to succumb to Abrupt Climate Change". I've added this video to that blogpost.
Already large tracts of California and some parts of Florida are now uninsurable, fancy that.
I watched the Cern Labatory in the Swiss Alps being constructed. 27 kilometres of tunnels through the mountains.
They seemed to have unlimited money, unlike that available for climate mitigation!
I also note that when it was in the R & D phase, many scientists were concerned that it could trigger some kind of unforeseen "Chain Reaction", they went ahead with the risk because they were so excited with the project. Pretty much what we do with everything.
https://kevinhester.live/2019/11/15/the-insurance-industry-soon-to-be-the-first-pillar-of-capitalism-to-succumb-to-abrupt-climate-change/