I came across this expression yesterday, my curiosity was piqued and the words of my professors came back to me “Our main goal is to teach you how to learn”. Ok, even though it’s not my field, I’ll give it a try,
Comment: 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 watch for signals of future climate tipping points.
In combustion aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, I would call it a transition point between two “stable” conditions. There is a point where it can be either and oscillate between the two conditions. For those interested in jet nozzles, the flow can generally be noisy up to certain speeds and depending on chamber design etc. as the flow increases clean note [resonance] may occur. This resonance can be strong enough to cause catastrophic failure, but there is a warning point “Puffing/fluttering” as pure resonance conditions are approached, varying rapidly between mere noise and resonance. Call it the paying attention phase if you will. Attention!
Anyway, before I bore everyone to death. This is how I think of the climate oscillation as a precursor to going right over the “tipping point”. Now the physics and variables in our global system are very complex, so once the oscillation starts, how much time do we have?
We now know that at the end of the African wet period there were about 1,000 years during which the climate regularly alternated between intensely dry and wet.
In total, we observed at least 14 dry phases, each lasting between 20 and 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 forever.
This can be reduced because we keep adding heat to the system [Global Warming] how this addition affects the time frames, [usually heat speeds things up] should be investigated.
Conversely, people in the region have undoubtedly been affected by climate change. The flicker would have a dramatic impact, easily noticed by a single person, compared to a slow climate transition spanning tens of generations.
A tip to our politicians to take into account what people are saying at least once.
Attention? You can’t handle the warnings!
This is particularly important for regions such as East Africa, whose nearly 500 million people are already highly vulnerable to climate change-induced impacts such as drought.
For information,
I will also link this article by one of my favorite writers
The trembling
Posted on November 3, 2023
Earth’s systems are being driven to 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 System Horizon – the point at which our planetary systems enter a new equilibrium hostile to most life forms? I think we can. The sudden acceleration of environmental crises we have witnessed this year, combined with the strategic futility of powerful governments, is pushing us to the point of no return.
We are told we are living through the sixth mass extinction. But even that is a euphemism. We call such events mass extinctions because the most visible sign of the five previous catastrophes of the Phanerozoic Era (since animals with solid body parts evolved) is the disappearance of fossils from rocks. But their disappearance was the result of something even greater. Mass extinction is 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, the soil was freed from drought, deserts spread over much of the planet’s surface and the oceans drastically deoxygenated and acidified. In other words, Earth’s systems were headed for a new state that was uninhabitable for most of the species they had supported.
