Ben Matthews

  • New here on lemmy, will add more info later …
  • Also on mdon: @benjhm@scicomm.xyz
  • Try my interactive climate / futures model: SWIM
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  • 16 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Indeed I see too much fatalistic doomerism here on Lemmy and it’s boring - waste of potential energy. We can try to explain better - if people want to understand - that climate system is complex, actions don’t give immediately tangible results, there are many sub-systems with inertia, and indeed various types of waves too, but most of this is predictable and the pathways we have to follow are well known.
    By the way about the jet-stream waves mentioned in the article, they have two sides - where I am it’s been cool recently.
    More importantly, seems likely that Chinese emissions are peaking, not because they are so virtuous but because their enormous over-construction bubble involving so much steel and concrete, which was driving global emissions growth, has burst. When I was in climate negotiations years ago, we could never get the chinese to agree to talk about peaking before 2025, yet it happened. Meanwhile renewable energy expands fast around the world.
    However we also reduced a lot of sulphate aerosols (both on land and from ships at sea), so we removed that temporary cooling, then on top of that we had El Niño, and have a peak in the solar cycle. The temperature spike then pushes more CO2 into the atmosphere from forests, soils and ocean, so we get bad news about atmospheric CO2, but such feedbacks happened before and are in the models, it’s not unexpected or out of control yet.



  • Well, maybe not just wait … Some factors will fall back - e.g. El Niño is a cycle, so are sunspots, ocean patches go round in (big-slow) loops, forests can run out of tinder (for a while). But to be sure to tip the balance of those climate-carbon feedbacks we need to get the temperature down - this could be done quicker by focusing especially on emissions of shorter-lived gases - mainly methane. Cutting out aviation-induced cirrus might also help to cancel some of the warming we got from cutting shipping sulphate - the opposite effect is because low clouds cause net cooling, high clouds cause net warming (depending on angle of sun etc. …). The good news is that models already include most of these factors, the bad news is that models say we have to cut emissions much faster than we do.


  • Global directly-anthropogenic CO2 emissions - things we measure and attribute to countries - have been flat in the period 2019-23 (except for covid dip), and maybe falling this year (due to changes in China). However there are also climate -> carbon feedbacks. The most obvious are forest fires which tend to peak during El Niño years (it’s a repeating pattern - I even remember 1998 seeming bad). Heating also enhances respiration by bugs in soils, and reduces the solubility of CO2 in seawater - the ocean is the largest and most long-term CO2 sink. El Niño also changes ocean circulation temporarily, but I forget which way this impacts CO2 (it’s not trivial - you have to think about the history and future of large patches of water).
    So, if known emissions are flat, but there is a record increase in the atmosphere, that means those feedbacks are worse. It takes a while to disentangle the factors, but this is not a surprise to me.





  • Hi, excuse me for replying so late, but i’ve been away from lemmy for.a while. Well, to summarise, the model calculates the future trajectories, of population, economy, emissions, atmospheric gases, and climate response etc., according to a set of (hundreds of) diverse options and uncertainties which you can adjust - the key feature is that the change shows rapidly enough to let you follow cause -> effect, to understand how the system responds in a quasi-mechanical way.
    Indeed you are right, complexity is beautiful, but hard. A challenge with such tools is to adjust gradually from simple to complex. Although SWIM has four complexity levels, they are no longer systematically implemented - also what seems simple or complex varies depending where each person is coming from, so i think to adapt the complexity filter into a topic-focus filter. Much todo …




  • I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
    If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity.



  • It’s only 5th December, seems unusually early for -58º. From Wikipedia - Yakutsk, maybe daily min should be about -37º now. I recall crossing Siberia by train in early December, rain in west, fresh snow in east, lakes still water, yet coming back in April you could still walk on Baikal. Seems odd, but they get extra problem of fires in winter, as fire hoses freeze, can’t extinguish them. Anyway polar vortex went wobbly recently, so we get alternating cold and warm waves - always look for both sides of regional anomalies.


  • Some people hardly ever used big-tech social media (preferred web1.0, making own sites), now start in the fediverse as it gains critical mass. A few specific transition issues: Appreciated complex boolean search in tweetdeck (abandoned since payable), look forward to similar functionality in Mastodon 4.2beta. Dropped FB after CA-brexit scandal, but now live in francophone community where FB still dominates interactions. Our schools mandate kids to use google’s networks. Kids seeking better options for music videos.
    Wider question - most people on fediverse in europe or north america - how do we reach rest of the world ?