Climate Letter #1703

“Climate is an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks” – Wallace Broecker

Wallace Broecker, who died in 2019, was a legendary climate scientist who took a keen interest in processes that could cause abrupt changes in our planet’s climate.  He is perhaps best known for ideas related to the circulation of massive ocean currents and what might happen if the warm one in the Atlantic were to stop flowing, which inspired the makers of a popular science fiction disaster film, “The Day After Tomorrow.”  The concept of a “temperature feedback loop” that I have presented, even in its current state of informality, might have quickly gained Broecker’s attention.  The fingerprints that appear in the Weather Maps are too strong to ignore, and I hope there are some readers who have already followed up on the prompting and advice issued in yesterday’s letter about how to look for them.  It will never be too late.

What do professional climate scientists today have to say about this particular concept? Nothing at all that I know of, based on the considerable amount of time and research spent composing these letters for almost seven years. I have even combed through a good many pieces of scientific literature in an effort to see where the climate change problem is really taking us. The Weather Maps only came into view accidentally, and I first looked at them mainly as a convenient way to stay current on weather developments. They contain an incredible amount of information, all visual, no math to bother with, and are set up in the friendliest of formats with something new and interesting appearing almost every day. So I just kept on exploring, and bit by bit the concept of a temperature feedback loop emerged from the depths of their inner workings. The completed form of the theory is only a few days old, following a realization of the implications of the dueling air pressure study, and you are the first people in the world to know about it.

In the most fundamental sense the concept is simply a portrait of the way nature has arranged a number of its constituent parts. These are parts that are seemingly quite independent from each other—until you are able to look closely for relationships. Which is exactly the opportunity the Weather Maps provide us with. What we can see is that the potential for developing either a positive or negative feedback loop is built right into the Earth’s weather system as part of the whole arrangement, always ready to go, no exceptions anywhere. Fortunately, nothing usually happens in the way of creating feedbacks that are active and persistent enough to be problematic. A minimal loop can easily be started and broken within a single season while a potentially big one may be sitting quietly on hand, unprovoked, like a baited mousetrap. But if you poke at it with a stick, as Broecker would say, the trap is always ready to spring, and off we go. The extraordinary loop we are now engaged in has been accelerating for a number of years. It appears to be moving through seasonal cycles one after another, leaving pieces behind at the end of any one season that are large enough to get each succeeding season off to a fast start in terms of year-to-year comparisons. The actual pieces appear to include things that permanently add to surface radiation, like newly inducted ocean heat and frozen ground that has thawed and does not refreeze again.

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The loop arrangement is entirely made up of moving parts.  As long as all the parts are in place the loop is not likely to go away and the chain of feedbacks should keep on happening.  Take away any one part and it will cease to function.  For example, if all the oceans were to freeze over, as they have done in the distant past, there would no longer be any streams of high-altitude water vapor generated having the power to amplify air temperatures on surfaces below.  If and when the oceans were then able to warm up again, what would keep the looping power from being reestablished?  Aren’t we talking about an arrangement that must embody certain fundamental laws of nature? And is this an arrangement that has been ignored by scientists for all these years because it has only now been discovered? Hey, I am personally interested, because it would be kind of cool to become recognized for discovering something of this magnitude and potential importance for extending human knowledge!

Carl

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