How Wondering Willis Eschenbach's religious background prevents him from understanding a scientific framework

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has been getting annoyed at science lately. I suppose it's because it's not showing what he wants to believe.

In his latest missive he loses the plot once again (archived here). He has read, but not understood the half of, a new paper just published in the early edition of science.

The Planetary Boundaries Framework

The new paper is discussing a framework, a planetary boundaries framework, by which society can be guided about what are biophysical safe limits, beyond which we should not go. That is, we should take care if we want civilisation and humans to flourish and try to stay within the safe limits.

Yes, it is a human-centric framework, devised to help decision-makers. Yet it is not a social framework. It's not about intergovernmental relations or human indices of well-being. It's a physical sciences framework. The framework is described in terms of the biophysical boundaries that are safe. Boundaries that we humans, through our actions, are pushing up against and in some cases have well and truly crossed.

The boundaries framework builds on the one proposed in a 2009 paper on the same topic. It updates the numbers and adds some discussion of regional boundaries, among other things. The planetary boundaries are illustrated in Figure 3 of the paper:

Figure 3: The current status of the control variables for seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Green zone is the safe operating space (below the boundary), yellow represents the zone of uncertainty (increasing risk), and red is the high-risk zone. The planetary boundary itself lies at the inner heavy circle. The control variables have been normalized for the zone of uncertainty (between the two heavy circles); the center of the figure therefore does not represent values of 0 for the control variables. The control variable shown for climate change is atmospheric CO2 concentration. Processes for which global-level boundaries cannot yet be quantified are represented by gray wedges; these are atmospheric aerosol loading, novel entities and the functional role of biosphere integrity. Modified from (1). Source: Steffen15

The new Climate Council - Australians aim high!

Almost $400,000 raised in just one day for the Climate Council - so Australians will continue to get solid information about our changing climate.

Mostly from small donations.  Australians have spoken!

Source: @ClimateCouncil

It would be great to get it to $5 million.  That would help set it up properly for the longer term.

You can become a Founding Friend and donate here.

If we cut CO2 emissions today...or Dunning and Kruger visit WUWT again

Update: See below for ABC news item on the horrid but expected decision of this new government to disband Australia's Climate Commission. (The website is still up here.)

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Anthony Watts has a cartoon by Josh as part of an article (archived here) telling his readers about how PM Tony Abbott has shut down the Climate Commission.  The cartoon is this one:

(you wouldn't) Credit: Josh - who suffers a serious case of the Dunning Kruger Effect
Source: Home of the DuKEs - WUWT

The object of the cartoon is Professor Tim Flannery who chaired Australia's Climate Commission.  Tim Flannery is not a meteorologist but he knows more about climate than all the deniers at WUWT and elsewhere put together.

If you read the top and bottom of the quote, you'd see that Josh (and presumably Anthony Watts) don't understand much about CO2 or climate.  As you'll see if you don't already know, Tim Flannery is, of course, correct.

One gets the feeling that Josh and Anthony Watts believe that a mere cut in CO2 would result in a drop in temperature.  That's pretty silly of them.  Any old cut in CO2 won't drop temperature.  As long as more CO2 is being added to the atmosphere than leaves it, then energy in the earth system will increase and temperatures will keep going up.  CO2 is a greenhouse gas and what it does is absorb IR radiation.  The more CO2 there is the less quickly will earth radiate energy to space.  That's why earth is heating up.

What the science says about CO2 and future temperature

I thought it might be worth writing an article about what the science says if the world suddenly stopped emitting any and all CO2 and what would happen if we started to cut emissions.