I came across this expression yesterday, my curiosity was aroused and the words of my Prof came back to me: “Our main goal is to teach you how to learn”. Okay, even though it’s not my area of expertise, I’ll give it a try.
Commentary: Our new study may warn us of future climate tipping points
Research by Professor Mark Maslin (UCL Geography) reveals that before North Africa dried out, the climate was “flickering” between two stable climate states. Writing in The Conversation, he urges us to watch for signs of future climate tipping points.
In combustion aerodynamics and fluid dynamics I would call it the transition point between two “steady state” conditions. There is a point where it can be both and can fluctuate between the two conditions. For those interested in nozzles the flow can be noisy up to certain speeds and depending on the design of the chamber etc as the flow increases it becomes a clean note [resonance] can occur. This resonance can be powerful enough to cause a catastrophic failure, but there is a warning point “To puff/to flutter“because the conditions for pure resonance are rapidly approached, ranging from mere noise to resonance. Call it the attention phase, if you like. Warning!
Anyway, before I bore everyone to death. This is how I think about Climate Flickering as a precursor to going over the “tipping point”. The physics and variables within our global system are very complicated, so how much time do we have once the flickering starts?
We now know that at the end of the humid period in Africa there was about 1,000 years during which the climate alternated regularly between extremely dry and wet.
In total we observed at least 14 dry phases, each lasting between 20 and 80 years and recurring at intervals of about 160 years. Later there were seven wet phases, of similar duration and frequency. Finally, about 5500 years ago, a definitive dry climate prevailed.
This can be reduced as we continue to add heat to the system [Global Warming] how this addition affects the time scales, [usually heat speeds things up] still needs to be investigated.
Conversely, people in the region were undoubtedly affected by the climate shift. The flickering would have had a dramatic impact, easily noticed by one person, compared to the slow climate transition that took tens of generations.
A tip for our politicians: listen to what people say.
Warning? You can’t handle warnings!
This is particularly important for regions like East Africa, where nearly 500 million people are already highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as drought.
For information,
I will also link to this article by one of my favorite writers
The flickering
Posted on November 3, 2023
The systems on Earth are being pushed to their tipping point by governments, while offering us nothing but chaos.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian on October 31, 2023
Can you see it? The Earth System Horizon – the point at which our planetary systems enter a new equilibrium, hostile to most life forms? I think so. The sudden acceleration of environmental crises we have seen this year, combined with the strategic futility of powerful governments, is bringing us to the point of no return.
We are told that we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction. But even that is a euphemism. We call such events mass extinctions because the most visible sign of the five previous catastrophes of the Phanerozoic (since animals evolved with hard bodies) is the disappearance of fossils from the rocks. But their disappearance was the result of something even bigger. Mass extinction is a symptom of the collapse of Earth systems.
In the most extreme case, the Permian-Triassic event 252 million years ago – when 90% of species were wiped out – planetary temperatures rose, water circulation around the globe more or less stopped, soil was stripped from the land, deserts spread over much of the Earth’s surface, and the oceans became dramatically deoxygenated and acidified. In other words, Earth systems entered a new state that was uninhabitable by most of the species that had supported them.