Top Scientists Plead For Someone To Calculate The Probability Of The End Of The World
Here's how the AP climate doom article starts:
Experts are ignoring the worst possible climate change catastrophic scenarios, including collapse of society or the potential extinction of humans, however unlikely, a group of top scientists claim.
Top scientists.
Those top scientists are Luke Kemp and others, who wrote the peer-reviewed paper "Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios" in the Proceedings of the National Woke Academy of Science.
Our top scientists, says the AP, "raise the idea of human extinction and worldwide societal collapse in the third sentence [of the paper], calling it 'a dangerously underexplored topic.'"
Well, they're right.
I counted and it was, indeed, the third sentence.
As far as under-exploring the end of the world due to the possibility of slightly increased temperatures, globally averaged, then no. They are wrong. It has been explored. And explored almost every hour, on the hour, since 1988.
Our top scientists explore it again in this paper. In that exploration, our top scientists discovered that, if the world were to end, and however unlikely this ending is, that it would be a bad thing.
Who knew?
We are in the presence of the pernicious precautionary principle---our authors speak of the danger of "underexplored and largely speculative 'unknown unknowns'". In its worst form, it asks us to search are darkest fears, and to give them a probability, of any size, as long as it is greater than zero.
Since your worst nightmare has a probability of greater than zero, it can therefore happen, logically speaking. And since it can happen, it might happen!
And isn't that scary?
And worth exploring by top scientists?
The obvious problem is that nothing, not even your more effeminate fears, has a probability. You can imagine any evil might happen, a task made easier the greater matriarchal urges rule a culture. The Safety First! mindset, as we have often discussed, is destructive of rational thought.
We see it in this paper:
A thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses (3), but even simpler “compound hazard” analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave (4).
Say out loud (really do this) "A population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave." Did you notice how whining you sounded? Or how, if you tried to take the scenario serious, you became worried, however vaguely, over a commonplace? The top scientists who wrote that have apparently forgotten that air conditioning is an invention that has only become widespread in the last half century or so. And that it still isn't everywhere. And that people who go outside when it's hot often survive.
Yet, to them, the mere thought that somebody somewhere might suffer temporary discomfort has them in a near panic. They are like those hersterical women who screech about their luxury SUV's seat heater malfunctioning. Safety First!
Our top scientists believe with a faith stronger than a child's in the Easter bunny in the veracity of climate models. And they are certain sure that the models aren't telling us how bad it can really get:
Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models.
"Tipping points", which will bring us a "climate catastrophe", is a pure model phenomenon. We have passed by, in Reality, dozens of these model tipping points the past thirty years. But, somehow, this is never remembered by modelers. One of a legion of such: A 2009 Wired article:
7 Tipping Points That Could Transform Earth
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issue [sic] its last report in 2007, environmental tipping points were a footnote. A troubling footnote, to be sure, but the science was relatively new and unsettled. Straightforward global warming was enough to worry about.
But when the IPCC meets in 2014, tipping points — or tipping elements, in academic vernacular — will get much more attention. Scientists still disagree about which planetary systems are extra-sensitive to climate shifts, but the possibility can't be ignored.
"The problem with tipping elements is that if any of them tips, it will be a real catastrophe. None of them are small," said Anders Levermann, a climate physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
So much for end of the world being unexplored.
Bonus top scientist tweet (A scientist not on the paper, but an analysis of equal climatological scientific awesomeness.)
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
Visit wmbriggs.com.
Is that Dessler Chart serious? That has to be satire.
The map makes the goal clear. The "most fragile states" are the countries with the LEAST fragile culture and civilization. "More exploration" is meant in the imperial sense. We need more Color Revolutions to convert those strong-culture countries into broken alienated panic zones like the "least fragile states".