David Karoly uses filling bath as analogy of climate change

David Karoly -
like water
filling a bath.

David Karoly explained some five years ago to Shepparton audience of about 70 how climate change was a little like a tap running into a bath.

So long as the plug wasn’t in place the water drained out just as quick as it ran in and everything remained in equilibrium.

Even with the plug in place and the bath beginning to fill, everything continued in equilibrium until the bath began to overflow and so a tipping point had been reached.

Everything was fine with the earth’s atmosphere when the naturally greenhouse gases were comfortably accommodated by the naturally existing sinks, such as earth’s oceans or existing forests, but then a couple of centuries ago that all changed.

Humans stumbled upon the keys to the fossil-fuel larder and in burning them effectively plugged the bath, the bath’s now full, it’s running over, a tipping point has been reached and because of those additional greenhouse gases earth’s atmosphere is in serious disequilibrium.

The upshot of that disequilibrium is the emergence around the world of never before seen changes to our weather, brought upon by seemingly small, but every-increasing temperatures.

And now having seen 14 of the 15 warmest years on record this century, the 21st century, and we are now on the verge of adding 2014 to that less than impressive record.

The Huffington Post reports that in a story headed: “2014 May Be Hottest Year On Record, WMO Warns”.

 

David Karoly is Professor of Meteorology and an ARC Federation Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is an expert in climate change science and was involved, through several different roles, in the preparation of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in 2007.