by KaiserJeep » Fri 06 Apr 2018, 17:41:31
You assume that as carbon dioxide and other GHG levels in the atmosphere rise, so will temperatures. You also assume that the rise will in some fashion be proportional to those GHG levels, and the atmospheric levels will be proportional to human GHG emissions. But it is certainly true that NONE of those are good assumptions.
The reason that none of the climate models are worth a damn is that the world is an insanely complex system, full of negative feedbacks that resist change. Some natural GHG abatement mechanisms that can only be described as negligent in impact today, will be happening with a vengeance as temperatures rise. The result will be a system that reaches a new equilibrium at a higher average temperature, not a world with temperatures spiking beyond reason.
Cloud covers are one such mechanism. As temperatures rise, cloud covers increase, and more heat is trapped in the upper atmosphere and less reaches the surface. Increased plant growth and an increased sequestration rate is another result of a negative feedback due to increased carbon dioxide.
For your ELE to occur, the world would have to be a dynamically unstable system that catastropically failed as the GHGs increased. That is simply not how planets work. There are periods in the past when GHGs and temperatures have increased far beyond where we are today. Then the feedbacks rolled back temperatures again. Human generated excess GHGs will be no different.
The real danger is that we will rip through all the oil, followed by all the coal, and not find new energy sources to replace them, and not renew our infrastructure to be more energy efficient than today. As I have said before, we could run our civilization on one sixth the energy we consume today, after infrastructure renewal. That level of energy consumption could easily be supplied by feeble renewable sources. Such renewal should have started decades ago, because using the last of the oil for that purpose would have eased the pain greatly.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0