Yesterday I came across this expression, my curiosity was awakened and the words of Prof. “Our main goal is to teach you how to learn”. Ok, even though it’s not my field, I’ll give it a try
Commentary: our new study may warn us of future climate tipping points
Research by Professor Mark Maslin (UCL Geography) reveals that before North Africa dried out, its climate ‘flickered’ between two stable climate states. In The Conversation, he urges us to look for signals about future climate tipping points.
In combustion aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, I would call this the transition point between two “steady” conditions. There is a point where it can be either and fluctuate between these two conditions. For those interested in jet nozzles, the flow can generally be noisy up to certain speeds and depending on the chamber design etc., as the flow increases the clean tone [resonance] may occur. This resonance can be strong enough to cause catastrophic failure, but there is a caveat.Chugging/fluttering” rapidly changes between noise and resonance as conditions for pure resonance are approached. Call it the pay attention phase if you want. Warning!
Anyway, before I bore everyone to death. This is how I think of Climate Flickering as a precursor to going right through the “tipping point”. Now the physics and variables in our global system are very complicated, so once the flashing starts, how much time do we have?
We now know that at the end of the African wet period there were about 1000 years during which the climate regularly alternated between intensely dry and wet.
In total, we observed at least 14 dry phases, each lasting 20 to 80 years and repeating at intervals of about 160 years. Later there were seven wet phases of similar duration and frequency. Finally, about 5,500 years ago, a dry climate prevailed for good.
This can be reduced as we continue to add heat to the system [Global Warming] how this addition will affect the timelines [usually heat speeds things up] needs to be explored.
Conversely, people in the region have undoubtedly been affected by climate change. The flicker would have a dramatic impact that would be easily noticed by a single person, compared to a slow climate transition over tens of generations.
Cue our politicians to pay attention to what the people are saying for once.
Warning? You can’t handle the warning!
This is particularly important for regions such as East Africa, where nearly 500 million people are already highly vulnerable to climate change impacts such as drought.
for information,
I will also link to this article by one of my favorite writers
Flashing
Posted on November 3, 2023
Earth’s systems are being rushed to their tipping points by governments that offer us nothing but chaos.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian on 31 October 2023
Can you see it yet? The Earth Systems Horizon – the point at which our planetary systems tip into a new equilibrium hostile to most forms of life? I think we can. The sudden acceleration of environmental crises we have witnessed this year, together with the strategic uselessness of powerful governments, is driving us to the point of no return.
We have been told that we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction. But even this is a euphemism. We call such events mass extinctions because the most visible sign of the five previous catastrophes of the Phanerozoic era (because animals with hard body parts evolved) is the disappearance of fossils from rocks. But their disappearance was the result of something even bigger. Mass extinctions are a symptom of the collapse of Earth’s systems.
In the most extreme case, the Permo-Triassic event, 252 million years ago—when 90% of species were wiped out—planetary temperatures rose, the circulation of water around the globe more or less stopped, land was stripped of land, deserts spread over much of the planet’s surface, and oceans drastically deoxygenated and acidified. In other words, Earth’s systems entered a new state that was uninhabitable for most of the species that sustained it.