I came across this phrase yesterday, it piqued my curiosity and brought back the words of the Profession “Our main objective is to teach you how to learn”. Right, even though it’s not my field, I’ll give it a go,
Comment: our new study could warn us about future climate extremes
Research by Professor Mark Maslin (UCL Geography) reveals that before northern Africa dried out, its climate “oscillated” between two climate stable states. In The Conversation, he urges us to pay attention to the signals of future climate hotspots.
In combustion aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, I would call that the transition point between the two “steady” conditions. There is a point where it can be either and it oscillates between the two conditions. For those interested in jet nozzles, the flow can be generally noisy up to certain speeds and depends on chamber design etc, as the flow increases the clean grade [resonance] can happen. This resonance can be powerful enough to cause a catastrophic failure, however, there is a cautionary point”Shot/Butterfly” as the conditions for pure resonance are approached by changing rapidly between noise alone and resonance. Call it the attention stage, if you will. Warning!
Anyway before that I bored everyone to death. This is how I think of the climate vibration as a precursor to going right over the “tipping point”. Now the physics and variables within our global system are very complicated, so once the vibration starts, how long do we have?
We now know that at the end of the African wet period there were about 1,000 years in which the climate regularly alternated between being intensely dry and wet.
In total, we observed at least 14 dry phases, each of which lasted between 20 and 80 years and repeated 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 permanently.
This may decrease because we are continuing to add heat to the system [Global Warming] how does this addition affect timelines, [usually heat speeds things up] should be researched.
Conversely, people in the region were undoubtedly affected by climate change. The tremor would have had a dramatic impact, easily noticed by a single human, compared to the slow climate transition spanning tens of generations.
Advice to our politicians to heed what the people are saying, for once.
Warning? You can’t handle warnings!
This is particularly important for regions such as East Africa, whose approximately 500 million people are already highly vulnerable to climate change-induced impacts such as drought.
For information,
I will also link this article from one of my favorite writers
Flickering
Posted on November 3, 2023
Earth 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 still see it? The Earth systems 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’ve seen this year, coupled with the strategic futility of powerful governments, is rushing us toward the point of no return.
We are told we are living through the sixth mass extinction. But this is also a euphemism. We call such events mass extinctions because the most visible sign of the five previous catastrophes of the Phanerozoic Era (after animals with strong body parts evolved) is the disappearance of fossils from rocks. But their disappearance was the result of something even bigger. 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 disappeared – planetary temperatures rose, the circulation of water around the globe more or less stopped, soil was removed from the earth, deserts spread to most of the planet’s surface and oceans deoxygenated and acidified drastically. In other words, Earth’s systems returned to a new state that was uninhabitable for most of the species they had harbored.