Civilisation is not going to collapse from a BOE. And I for one do not believe that the current trend towards higher temperatures is going to cause any permanent collapse of civilisation.
But what worries me way more than any putative "hope for BOE" is the apparent "hope for civilisational collapse" thinking I see expressed here. Do people really hope for a civilisational collapse, with all the human suffering that implies?
Binntho,
Once again .... the discussion here is about the impacts that catastrophic climate change will have. Prognosticating on those based on the science is -not- hoping (an emotional state) for them to happen.
A BOE in and of itself won't do anything to collapse civilization. However, the knock on effect of the absence of ice (the cold pole in the Earth's atmospheric and oceanic systems) will have on the thermodynamics that drive the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans will lead inexorably to the destruction of civilization.
This is not a hope. This is not a fear. Those are emotional states and reactions to conditions. We have to get that right. Emotion does not in any way control what happens to the environment, except in so far as emotion drives human actions and inaction. Emotion is not central or controlling. Physics is.
As and when the atmospheric circulation loses its cold pole driving force, major reorganization and changes are inevitable and unavoidable. Greenland will for at least centuries act as a brake on the sudden shift to a wholly different circulation. Whether that is enough is an as yet unanswered question.
However quite certainly the loss of the immense area of cold that is the Arctic Ocean and the continental land masses will have a dramatic effect. We are already seeing the beginnings of that with serious changes in the circumpolar jet stream, and the continental jet stream.
The circumpolar jet stream (the northern of the two that forms the boundary between the Ferrell and Polar atmospheric cells has all but disappeared for much of the year. It has been replaced by a highly disorganized set of circulations.
The continental jet stream (the jet stream we all recognize as "the" jet stream) has lost much of its driving force for much of the year. As the Arctic warms and the ice cover is lost, and with it the driving force for circulation, the jet stream has become highly erratic. It has exhibited great swings north and south that have in turn steered massive changes in weather dragging cold blasts far south and extreme warmth far north. It is already causing huge changes in the timing and amount of rain falling on the continents. This will get progressively more severe until finally the jet stream vanishes entirely.
At that point, the climate system shifts into a new and completely different mode. The Hadley, Ferrell and Polar cells will then cease to exist. They will be replaced by a circulation dominated by a single hemisphere wide Hadley circulation combined with some sort of polar condition that we lack the data to even model. This has happened for long periods in Earth's past. We know aspects of how it did behave. But we do not know enough to replicate this with models. This is the "equable" climate.
During the shift, rain, storms, heat, drought, wind and more will all under go massive changes. Agriculture depends on having a reasonably stable climate with predictable timing of temperature, and precipitation. That will be gone. Agriculture as we know it will end. It may continue in some changed form. However, the reliable conditions we have known will end.
With the end of agriculture and the loss of the food stuffs agriculture provides inevitably comes starvation and population collapse. With that comes mass relocation of populations, war and worse. Those will coincide with the end of human civilization as we know it.
Beyond this one effect, the impacts on other species, on drought, disease, and other factors will be equally immense.
These are not things that anyone hopes for. They are the inevitable end of the chain reaction that starts with the loss of the Arctic ice, which is signaled by the BOE. That in turn isn't a simple thing. The first ice free day in the Arctic won't be the end. The first ice free summer (months long) may be. The first ice free spring and fall almost certainly will be. And the first ice free Arctic winter absolutely will be.
I asked earlier about the emotional driving forces in people's thinking. And this is why. A large portion of the population has their thought processes dominated by emotion. That serves us well for local things (local in both time and space). It does not serve us well outside of those. To the contrary, it serves to tremendously confuse the discussion and to dramatically limit action.
It should be the reverse, but it isn't. Fear of the impacts should drive massive action to prevent the actions that lead us exorably to the end of civilization and deep into the sixth great extinction event. But fear doesn't work that way. Fear inhibits reason. And that prevents the very deep analysis required to understand the problems and to developing and implanting the actions required to prevent catastrophe. Fear instead leads to avoidance, opposition and paralysis
Emotional thinking in this regard is a huge negative. It leads to misplaced assignment of people's motivations. It leads to the erroneous belief that people want or hope for tragedy to happen. And that ends up derailing the very discussions that are required to meaningfully understand what is happening and to then doing anything to prevent it.
We have to get past this.
Sam