Khaos added to the Carbon Bathtub

 

Khaos added to the Carbon Bathtub

The CO₂ bathtub analogy illustrates how understanding flows is vital to understand how global overheating works, and how to counter it. Imagine this bathtub holding all the excess CO₂ in the atmosphere. A tap representing our CO₂ emissions is adding CO₂ to the bath faster than the plughole is letting CO₂ out by natural sequestration. So the level of CO₂ in the bathtub is steadily rising. To complete the analogy, the goddess Khaos (Chaos) is taking a bath and splashing around. The fuller the bath gets, the more she splashes. But what gets splashed, are extreme weather events; hurricanes, floods and droughts. The fuller the bathtub gets, the more likely the splashes are to get over the rim of the bath. I think that adding Khaos to the analogy sorts out the limitation of the bathtub appearing to reach a single level where it overflows. That level might be the point where climate feedbacks kick in irreversibly.

If climate feedbacks do kick in irreversibly, then all bets are off and nothing can be done to avert catastrophe. For me it’s a matter of faith that we have not yet reached that point, and that global overheating can be reversed (see my blog page). No scientist can prove that we have reached the point of irreversible climate feedbacks until we are well past that point. This is because of Chaos Theory and the associated uncertainty.