On a previous thread, Donald Rapp describes the effect of the Goldilocks principle on climate science: Not too hot, not too cold not too dry, not too wet–“the Goldilocks planet.” But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.Īnd through all of this, the authors conclude, the Earth has remained perfectly habitable–in stark contrast to its planetary neighbors.
From the blurb at :Ĭlimate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place.
There’s a recent book titled The Goldilocks Planet. Some climatologists, suggest that the Goldilocks “just right” level of atmospheric CO2 was between 280 and 300 ppmv (19th century level) with anything over 450 ppmv (or even 350 ppmv!) no longer “just right” – but downright “dangerous”, in fact.ĭecadal scale climate amnesia and shifting baselines contribute to this ‘just right’ perception of the current climate. It is already no longer “just right” and getting less so following an accelerated trend, due to human greenhouse gas emissions.
Returning to science, climatologists have adopted the Goldilocks “just right” principle for our climate, with the premise that our climate was “just right” before humans started to interfere with it. Their house is an igloo (what else?), the “just right” porridge she eats is made of ground seal pup mush but she is very hungry (“perlertok”), so this doesn’t matter, and when they awaken her, the little blonde Eskimo girl also manages to run away unscathed despite the nanuks’ carnivore instincts and inclinations. Since this thread is about the Arctic, it should be pointed out that the “Blond Eskimos” (living between mainland Canada and Victoria Island) tell a similar tale:Īlso of a little blonde girl (“niviasar”) and three bears – in this case, polar bears (“nanuks”), of course. We all know the fairy tale story of “Goldilocks and the three bears”, where GL enters the bears’ house (while they are all gone), snoops about and finds the “just right” chair, bowl of porridge and bed before being awakened by the returning bears and chased away. On the polar bear thread, Max Anacker writes: There is a youtube video entitled Goldilocks and the Greenhouse: the Science of Climate Change. However, when it comes to planet Earth, we have a much narrower definition of the Goldilocks zone for climate. In planetary science, the ‘Goldilocks zone’ is terminology for the the band around a sun where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. Is it so unfamiliar as to seem random, intractable, obfuscated or even alien? Is it so simple that it’s boring, overly familiar, or simply uninteresting? It is a fascinating presentation, but I refer here specifically to slides 11 and 12: My interest in the Goldilocks Principle was piqued by a presentation that I recently heard by Gary Flake entitled The Computational Beauty of Nature. After testing each of the three items, Goldilocks determines that one of them is always too much in one extreme (too hot, too large, etc.), one is too much in the opposite extreme (too cold, too small, etc.), and one is “just right”. Each bear has their own preference of food, beds, etc. The Goldilocks principle states that something must fall within certain margins, as opposed to reaching extremes. The Goldilocks principle is derived from a children’s story “ The Three Bears” in which a little girl named Goldilocks finds a house owned by three bears. What is the Goldilocks Principle? From the Wikipedia: On what we can learn from Goldilocks and The Three Bears regarding our perceptions of climate, climate science, communication and policy.Ĭontinuing with the recent bear theme at Climate Etc., lets think about applications of the Goldilock’s principle to climate, climate science, communication and policy.
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