by liberal japonicus
The Grauniad has two interesting articles that form something like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The first is about an attempt to thicken Arctic ice. Seems plausible until the section about autonomous underwater drones. Paired with that is this piece about all of the far-out geo-engineering plans that have been mooted in the past. It’s clear our world has reached the point where we need a deus ex machina/ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός. My favorite line in the last article is this.
…as the US climatologist PE Lydolph, an expert on the geography of the Soviet Union, put it: “In general, the country lacks heat.”
Discuss.
In general, the earth’s surface is getting a bit warmer. But the trouble with glittering generalities like that is that local changes may be radically different. See the temperatures in the Eastern United States this year. But that will pale in comparison to what we will see in Europe
ifwhen the Gulf Stream shuts down. I’m not sure how far eastward the impact will extend, but northern and western Europe are in for some serious chill, overall global warming notwithstanding. The medieval “Little Ice Age” may look minor ir comparison.As for Russia, global warming might be thought to make vast swathes of Siberia warmer and so more livable. But vast, basically impassible, swamps from melted permafrost may be more likely. Certainly any kind of ground transportation systems (roads and railroads) will have to be recreated from scratch.
It occurs to me that my view here is seriously parochial. I expect changes to ocean currents will have some similarly drastic impacts in, for example South Asia. If the monsoon rains don’t come, it’s gonna be ugly. But I don’t know enough to know if that is a serious possibility. Ditto what changes to rainfall paterns we will see in Africa. More rain, making the Sahel a breadbasket for the continent? Less rain, making agriculture less productive — leading to widespread starvation and like-it-or-not massive migrations? I have no clue which.
It occurs to me that my view here is seriously parochial.
I recall a scientist, relatively well respected, who argued that we couldn’t really say if climate change was bad because it might result in longer growing seasons and other effects that would benefit humankind. I personally think (and events seem to have borne this out) that this is/was a mistake, because the biggest problem with climate change is the lack of predictability and randomness that has been introduced. Because of this randomness, any benefits of climate change are pretty much wiped out by an inability to predict what the weather is actually going to be like.
I look at it as a question of entropy. Life on this planet has adapted to the prevailing climate – human development even moreso. What we have had is what could be considered order – like a neat bedroom, where everything is in its proper place and the bed is nicely made.
There are far, far fewer possible states that are orderly than there are disorderly states. If you don’t effortfully keep the room neat, it will get messy as a matter of overwhelming probability. The room will not vacillate from being messy back to being neat and back to being messy again. It will simply go from one messy state to another. The neat, orderly room will not appear by chance.
So, to me, the idea that AGW/climate change will result in something just as good or better than what humans and other species have adapted to is like expecting a room to become neat randomly and without someone making it so. There are far too many more ways for things to get f**ked up than to stay just as good or better.
Is all life going to end? No. Will it adapt over time? Yes. Will the transition suck big, stinky a**? Absolutely!
I can’t find the science fiction quote, but it’s basically that any attempts at geoengineering should be approached with a great deal of caution and some very, very good software. Just my opinion, but we’re nowhere close to the level of software that was being suggested.
Like wj, I know that I’m parochial in my outlook. This next week is going to be hot, as typically happens in the run-up to the North American Monsoon starting. Daily record tying, perhaps, but not any serious sort of record breaking. Drought, but the water capture and management systems are adequate if (a) we didn’t have to send enormous amounts hundreds of miles downstream and (b) we quit growing corn for the ethanol plants. I take perhaps inappropriate pleasure in the fact that in 20 years the local power authority has gone from all fossil fuels except a bit of hydro, to summer mornings when they sell excess wind and solar power. Also, that Broadcom designs and manufactures chips here in large part because the electricity was/is so reliable. They just announced $1.5B in upgrades and expansions and none of it is associated with AI or requires massive new amounts of electricity.
Entropy, yes, but more basic thermodynamics: add more heat to a container of water (which the Earth is, in the ‘uniform spherical cow’ sense) and you get more turbulent flow. Hotter climate = more chaotic weather.
Yes, geoengineering should have some good software to support it, but modelling turbulent flow is HARD and compute intensive. Commandeer the AI data centers.
Snarki, HSH et. al: Curious what you math heads make of Willis Eschenbach’s application of the Constructal Law of flow systems and Bejan’s theoretical Constructal climate models by comparing a computation of the Constructal model to two decades of CERES satellite observations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030326472600050X
Although an “ultra-simple model”, it produced observed temperatures very closely (I like how it is described as “ultra-simple” and yet I cannot fathom the maths having peaked in differential equations in college and I’ve never, ever used that since). Discussion here (I know, I know it’s in WUWT, but his article was peer reviewed):
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/14/the-model-that-works/
He used the model to see what would happen by a doubling of CO2 and, well, its prediction wasn’t as catastrophic as some models.
Google Scholar suggests this link to an alternate source of a PDF of the Eschenbach paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=5956851
Assuming the model is perfectly accurate, the author identifies its weakness: it predicts the steady-state increase in average annual temperature due to an increase in CO2. What it doesn’t predict are most of the things that matter (in the sense of impact): variance of temperature around the annual mean (higher or lower); humidity; precipitation; changes in annual circulation patterns on a less than global scale; frequency of extreme events.
Consider the Nebraska Sandhills, which are the largest dune field in the Americas. Best estimate by the biologists is that a couple of inches less effective annual precipitation and the grass that currently stabilizes them dies. Once the grass is gone, the dunes become mobile again. The last time this happened was between 800 and 1200 years ago during a previous megadrought. Will it happen? That depends on lots more variables than the annual average temperature.
One of the reasons the physics-based climate models have become supercomputer-sized is that they attempt to model lots of variables at a resolution fine enough to answer questions like the Sandhills. (Or my own personal favorite, the North American Monsoon.)
Don’t overestimate my math-headedness. I have a degree in EE. My math practice these days is doing arithmetic in my head and musing at a conceptual level. I do sometimes get sucked into solving problems that get posted on my FB feed, but those are mostly refreshers of things I could solve in HS.
Looks like the WattsUp faithful are still fixating on picking apart models while actual observations are serving up stuff like this:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-7/slumping-mountainsides-in-alaska-are-causing-massive-tsunamis/
Halfway through the massive bio of William Morris that is too big for current hand capacity, but finished a slimmer volume analyzing his approach to art and socialism. Interesting dude with lots to offer a modern eco-activist once you set aside the massive limitations that patriarchy and Victorian masculinity had on his ethical utopianism.
On to reading conversations about the environmental movement between Murray Bookchin (anarchist social ecologist) and Dave Foreman (founder of Earth First!). So much to be learned from their mutual effort to find ground for mutual support despite political differences.
I’ve spent little time looking at the paper: the author lost me at “the most recently discovered fundamental law of thermodynamics”. Whatever the merits of the “Constructal Law”, it’s not fundamental; it’s a description of how a class of system behaves as a result of the application of fundamental laws.
It’s possible to create a very simple climate model, ignoring all feedback effects (other than the increase in radiation as the earth gets hotter – the Planck response – which is sometimes categorized as a feedback effect). In this model, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases equilibrium global temperatures by about 1%: my guess is that the paper has in effect done this calculation.
In reality, feedback effects matter a lot. Simply by looking at how global temperatures have risen with atmospheric carbon dioxide, it’s apparent that actual climate sensitivity is substantially higher. And that’s just the transient response: the equilibrium value will be higher still.