Comment Re:More Info & Dashboard (Score 1) 1657
Irreversible damage, to me, from a systems engineering perspective, means an unstable system or a system that trends according to a power law. No system that I can think of that involves climate or the earth behaves in that manner - rather, they all follow logarithmic or inverse power laws to trend to a steady state. And yet, somehow, you're telling me that all of the sudden we're going to see e^x where something like that hasn't existed for millions of years? Maybe there's a good reason I'm still skeptical.
Please read up on the potential for positive feedback of carbon release through the melting of permafrost and the reduction in albedo through the melting of polar ice.
1) Permafrost contains a lot of sunk carbon. As the arctic warms, the potential exists for this permafrost to melt and release this carbon. This will create a positive feedback that further warms the arctic, etc.
2) As polar ice melts, the albedo (inverse of reflectiveness) of the polar seas decreases, leading to more heat being trapped (less heat being reflected into space due to lower albedo) thus warming the ocean such that polar ice melting increases. A second positive feedback cycle.
I would describe these systems as unstable: once pushed (past some stable zone, perhaps) the effect grows: see "reverse pendulums" (regular pendulums are stable). This damage (damage defined as climate change antithetical to comfortable human existence) to is likely to be irreversible on human timescales absent some pretty awesome technology.
I believe that I'm going to get to experience these effects first-hand. China will not get clean in time and the United States lacks the will. I don't expect to die (given current trends) until the 2060s at least. As an upper-middle class white male in the United States, the impacts on me will be more survivable than for almost anyone else on the planet, but I believe that things will get "interesting", in the Chinese sense of the word.