Wood Romances

In a previous post , I considered the rise of pseudo-skepticism in much of current contrarian movements. At the heart of pseudo-skepticism is using what is demonstrably wrong as justification for the rejection of known evidence and well-established science; in order to explain the fact that virtually all the evidence disagrees with you, you need a conspiracy to explain the contradictory evidence away. So "flat earthers" say that because "you can see too far" and "water seeks its level" the earth must be flat, and physics and geology and maps and common sense are all wrong. That means NASA must be doctoring photographs of the earth, air traffic is faked, and nobody has ever been to Antarctica. Most people are "sheeple" who are simply not skeptical enough to see through all the lies and evidence and data and common sense to know that everyone in authority is lying to us. This kind of thinking can only be sustained with a well-developed confirmatio...

A new meta-analysis of tipping points[1] was just published that evaluates the 10 most significant tipping elements, and for each tipping element, the study assesses how well we understand the processes involved, the associated time scales, and how large the climate impact may be. The paper is currently behind a paywall, and while the authors have said they're working on making the paper open access, you can still view a prepub version of the paper[2] on line for free. The concept of a tipping point can be easily misunderstood. It's often described (at least in climate discussions) as a point beyond which catastrophic, runaway global warming occurs, taking global climate irreversibly into an inhospitable state (sometimes compared to runaway warming on Venus). This paper defines "tipping elements" and "tipping points" consistent with a paper by Kopp et al 2016. For this paper, "'tipping elements'...refer to any systems capable of committed nonlin...