I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life.
"Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.
> It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
The guy is talking about 10 degrees C scenarios, aka scenarios that nobody believes is going to happen.
The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century.
When someone can rationally talk about what will happen in the IPCC predicted scenarios, which is the scientific consensus, then I will listen to them.
If you are some crank, who is talking about 1000 parts per million of C02, and 10 degrees C temp increase by 2100, well then you shouldn't be taken seriously.
Elsewhere in this thread, it's been stated that the IPCC has omitted runaway positive-feedback loop scenarios from their predictions, either because they're too poorly understood, or because they're too depressing.
I haven't gone back to re-read for this, but I believe 10 degrees is presented as a worst-case scenario because if we hit that it's pretty much game over.
The part you may want starts around footnote 20, in a paragraph that notes 4 degrees as a median projection from the IPCC, with up to 8 degrees at the high end of the curve without factoring in permafrost melt and its associated carbon release or any of a variety of other exacerbating factors (footnoted in the article).
There are ways to calculate how much effort or expense is reasonable to attempt to mitigate a risk, I believe that's often part of the job description of actuaries. Part of it involves figuring out what the cost is if the event in question happens, then what the likelihood of the event is.
For example, it explicitly mentions 10 degrees C of warming over the next century.
A 10 degrees C scenario is not something that any respectable scientist believes is going to happen.
The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be a 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century.
Thats the facts. Please listen to the scientists. Every single doomsday prediction that this guy is making, can be traced back to this fundamental problem that he is talking about scenarios that the experts and the scientists do NOT believe has even a remote chance of happening.
Such short-term warming due methane clathrates is certainly possible.
A study based on a coupled climate–carbon cycle model (GCM) assessed a 1000-fold (from <1 to 1000 ppmv) methane increase - within a single pulse, from methane hydrates (based on carbon amount estimates for the PETM, with ~2000 GtC), and concluded it would increase atmospheric temperatures by >6 °C within 80 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Model...
"a sufficiently large warming (roughly estimated as 5–6 ◦C, see Robinson 2000) would inevitably lead to an ecological disaster resulting in a complete depletion of oxygen."
I'm a big proponent of huge increases in funding for fusion research. But I think a better "extreme measures" project to mitigate global warming is the space sunshade:
The fusion Manhattan project? The problem with that is the Manhattan project scientists knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. With fusion research there are already dozens of active research efforts, but we have absolutely no idea if any of them will work, or if we need a new approach nobody has thought of. In this situation throwing money at the problem simply isn't the solution.
Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
I don't think scientists in the Manhattan project knew exactly how to do it. That's why they ended up having (at least) two totally different types of bombs, one with a Plutonium core using spherical implosion and another with a Uranium core using cannon-like ignition.
Why try one scheme when you can try two at twice the price?
But both worked fine. So yes, they really did know what they were doing. The reason to do two versions wasn't really in case one didn't work, they had very good reason to believe both would work. It was a matter of which would offer the best combination of efficient fission, weight, cost and reliability. We do not have two clearly viable different routes to practical fusion reactors. We don't even have one at this point.
> With fusion research there are already dozens of active research efforts, but we have absolutely no idea if any of them will work, or if we need a new approach nobody has thought of.
That is the definition of research. Once something is discovered that works, it is called development.
> In this situation throwing money at the problem simply isn't the solution.
Why is funding fundamental physics research a bad idea?
> Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
Technology does not solve anything "for us," we choose to develop and apply technology. We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research.
>Why is funding fundamental physics research a bad idea?
It's not a bad idea and we are doing it. Fundamental research into fusion is happening on many fronts. That is a good thing and I am not arguing against it. There may even be good arguments to increase funding on some of those approaches.
I'm saying that a 'huge' increase in funding, as proposed, at this stage would be premature given that there are plenty of other alternative power technologies that are proving very effective. We already spend billions of dollars on fusion research. If we're going to spend huge amounts of extra funding on power generation, there are better ways to use it right now.
>We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research
What do you think we should hugely cut spending on in order to fund this huge increase? Proposals to spend lots of money on this or that are somewhat unconvincing unless you can explain where the money should come from.
> What do you think we should hugely cut spending on in order to fund this huge increase? Proposals to spend lots of money on this or that are somewhat unconvincing unless you can explain where the money should come from.
That is actually the easy part. Latest numbers I have seen are from 2009, when the US government paid farmers $5 billion to waste their time growing corn to turn into ethanol (basically to turn 1 barrel of oil into 0.7 barrels of oil equivalent), and paid oil and gas companies $7 billion in oil and gas exploration subsidies. Enough money for huge increases in both renewable energy and fusion research programs:
The problem is that will raise the price of agricultural commodities. I think we might be better off trying to genetically engineer varieties of Algae to be more efficient.
It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere.
Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.
> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference.
This is idiocy. You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement. Not merely they're mistaken, not merely they have imperfect data, but intentionally deceiving with malice. That's how many scientists and how much data there is contravening your first statement, not least of which is Exxon - that liberal bastion of environmental preservation.
"You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement"
The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]:
"Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere."
and
"Carbon dioxide comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources; natural sources are predominant."
Your misunderstanding is apparently common enough that the last assertion is offered in the context of dispelling a myth.
That page says:
Myth: Carbon dioxide comes only from anthropogenic sources, especially from the burning of fossil fuels.
Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier.
The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels.
Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.
"But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier."
I assume you refer to Rick Perry. In point of fact the myth/reality portion of the page has been unchanged since at least September of 2015 [1], at which time Obama appointee Ernest Moniz was Secretary of Energy. Dr. Moniz has never denied the fact that the climate is changing, as far as I'm aware.
Sure, if you don't include the word "net". Natural processes account for the majority of CO2 introduced into the atmosphere. They also account for the majority of the CO2 removed from the atmosphere, because there's an equilibrium flow.
The important part is that anthropogenic sources are a significant contribution to the net imbalance of those flows, because it's all in one direction.
It's like arguing that your spending, because is a small fraction of the amount of money you move between your checkings and savings accounts, won't make you run out of money...
Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much better world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process.
Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.
I recommend you read "Money: The Unauthorized Biography [0]" You'll never look at money the same way again. Money is not a commodity even though we treat it as such. It certainly is not a finite resource.
Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.
Actually.. Original money was just a highly marketable commodity. Salt, spices, gold, cigarettes in prison. I highly suggest a better biography of currency. Maybe something authored by one of those pesky Austrians.
The tl;dr is that the commonly told origin of money, right back to Adam Smith, is a-historical assumption that is contradicted by archeological evidence.
The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.
The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.
It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.
So you're saying the first money was essentially "social credit"? I don't disagree with the spirit of the argument, but your good-will credit in your community doesn't have the properties we associate with currency such as fungibility and divisability.
If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.
I already have an alternate view of money. I look at generalized wealth more directly, with money merely an somewhat interesting special case that is less special than most people think it is. (I tend to think even economists pay too much attention to currency. Not that they pay attention only to currency, but that they pay too much attention to it.) The simple truth is that if you bend the economy towards creating wind and solar and cutting down hydrocarbon usage and all the other things we have to do, all the people doing that stuff as the result of a hoax aren't doing something else that would have been more useful.
Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.
My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.
I wonder where the theory that government spending is simply free actually comes from, that somehow when the government spends money (or enacts regulation or taxes, same thing) that the cost is somehow magically not that everybody has to work more and/or harder to achieve those things.
I have heard this line several times before, and it is the environmental equivalent of "What if there is no God, and we are being good to each other for nothing."
It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.
Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.
There is only so much you can reduce waste though. The internal combustion engine is limited by thermodynamics to about 50% efficiency, we are already reaching >40% in production engines. There just isn't much more waste we can get rid of. (electric cars bring up a different sets of limits, though probably higher)
So you work hard to keep that feedback gain under '1' in an amplifier and over '1' in an oscillator.
Technically an amplifier with a feedback mechanism can become an oscillator and if you break the feedback loop in an oscillator you end up with 'just' an amplifier.
To make this even more interesting: a negative feedback element in an amplifier will greatly enhance the frequency response at the expense of amplification (and will vastly reduce the chances of that amplifier turning into an oscillator).
correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've been misunderstood. Are you saying:
1. Most CO2 release is natural
2. We increased CO2 through our own efforts as well
3. [implied statement you may agree with: this led to a feedback loop]
4. We now may be too late to stop it merely by reducing emissions, if planetary emissions of stored carbon take over and become the main source of CO2 emissions
I think's actually fairly profound. We may have pushed the system towards a new equilibrium, and it's now moving itself faster than we are pushing it. The only way to stop it would be to invent something to suck carbon from the atmosphere on a massive scale.
Is that what you were saying? You're getting downvotes because your first statement, while technically true, isn't very profound. Natural carbon emissions were counterbalanced by natural carbon storage.
But that might not be true if our additional emissions have triggered enough feedback loops.
We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years.
This of course led to a feedback loop.
Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.
I believe (but cannot prove, obviously) that we're way past the tipping point. Meaning simply reducing anthropocentric emissions, even down to zero, will not meaningfully impact atomspheric CO2, methane.
For civilization to survive, we must adapt, mitigate, or both.
> It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere.
This is technically true, but I think it misses the point.
It's like complaining about Jeff Bezos being financially irresponsible because he bought a yacht. It might be financially irresponsible for you or me to buy a yacht, but Jeff Bezos's bank account is much bigger, and refills much more rapidly.
It's true that the natural carbon cycle involves a lot of sequestered carbon being released into the air, but nature actually consumes a little bit more carbon than it emits. If we left the natural carbon cycle alone, atmospheric carbon would decline.
Human industry is fundamentally the opposite. We emit CO2, but we don't sequester it in any significant way. Nature may pump more CO2 into the air than we do, but it also absorbs far more than we do. In fact, once nature consumes all of its own CO2, it consumes roughly 40% of what we put out there. The remaining 60% of our output is why atmospheric carbon keeps increasing.
Industry? Not initially, no. Activity? Absolutely.
One theory is that agriculture prevented another mini-ice age. I don't know where in the "believe, but cannot prove" spectrum this theory lies (a la http://edge.org).
"Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate."
Complex adaptive systems. Disrupt a system's equilibrium and you get chaos. Hard to predict, mitigate.
I came to that realization after taking an environmental education class where they " left out the feedback loops". I disagree with your sentiment that they had to leave things like this out of the model. If it was left out it was probably not well understood. Its pretty easy to see that any form of mitigation is irrelevant until it becomes a real problem because getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society. Usually that only occurs when its pretty apparent that they have to do something to mitigate it.
One of the major flaws of this species is that we don't do anything inconvenient, that requires global agreement, until it becomes literally an existential threat. And even then we may dither, and there will be special interests that will keep spreading out misinformation about it, etc.
Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
> Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
Compared to what? I think you should be happy with what you've got, because it's the best we've ever seen. I'm happier with a species that could burn out, than one that could do no wrong. If there was a problem, yo, we'll solve it.
I'm a licensed HAM radio operator, but I'm too young to have gone through the Morse era. One of the things that book did for me was kindling my interest in learning to transmit and receive Morse.
I mean, you never know when you might need it, right? :)
I recently read D.O.D.O., and I'm convinced that it's in the same literary world as Anathem and Seveneves. I won't say more, but do read D.O.D.O., if you've otherwise liked Stephenson's work.
Considering that research shows that every human existed today is descended from a small group that survived the Ice Age in Madagascar, I wouldn't call it a flaw. More like a self-regulating system that adjusts to behaviors where every independent actor is out for themselves.
This isn't a flaw in the species. It's a consequence of game theory and evolution and would likely be found in any species that was a product of evolution.
I was discussing that with a friend once and I argued that a more intelligent species might fare worse in these matters. It would more rapidly and aggressively exploit its environment due to higher intelligence and would therefore run a greater risk of triggering catastrophic environmental events.
The problem is that there is no game theoretic advantage in cooperating to reduce CO2 unless everyone cooperates. If one large player (e.g. USA or China) or many small players do not cooperate then the incentive flips and it's actually in everyone's best interest to defect. If catastrophic climate change is going to happen anyway then you are better off burning as much CO2 as you want to build up your economy so you have a better chance of mitigating the damage. It's basically a variation on the prisoner's dilemma scenario.
I guess someone didn't like hearing what you said, but you're absolutely right. Global agreements are coordination problems; there's an incentive to violate them, discretely at least. And there's a cost to genuinely comply with the agreement while others are clandestinely violating it.
To be fair to us we are only just barely sentient.
In evolutionary terms we have literally only just managed to build a technological society. Therefore it stands to reason we only recently evolved sufficient intelligence to do so. Otherwise we'd have done it sooner. In the grand scheme of things we're on the very lowest bottom level of the sentience hierarchy.
That's fair, but it'll be sad to see our species added to the dustbin of history after squandering such a great opportunity to move from planetary to stellar civilization.
If there happen to be any other sentient species watching us, I can only assume they spend most of the time face-palming, head-shaking and eye-rolling.
> I can only assume they spend most of the time face-palming, head-shaking and eye-rolling
Or they see us as a natural phenomenon following similar patterns to other fledgling civilizations. We don't roll our eyes when a pathogen is so virulent it kills its host before it propagates.
Maybe there aren't any. Maybe all sentient species self-destruct when they discover and start developing technology but don't understand all the implications. There's a theory along these lines that explains why we've never found any signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
In my humble opinion, antinatalism contributes much to it. Smartest people I know are strictly antinatalist, and it makes sense. What's the point of keeping a specie alive? The very product of universe's RNG? Life is mostly suffering as it is, inter-stellar life would probably be even worse.
I'm personally not invested in the environment-preservation fight at all.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I find antinatalist views to be small-minded, selfish and cowardly. In a vast universe of dead matter which tends toward equilibrium and decay there exists a process that tends toward complexity and order.
Life exists in this universe, it's a part it's nature and so is consciousness. Whether by design or by some random chance, it is self-evident that it exists. Not only that, you can find it adapted to the extremes of every environment it encounters.
Suffering is the engine of adaptation and everything we consider valuable has only come about through the immense suffering and sacrifice of those that have lived.
We, as conscious life, are the only known species which have the possibility to adapt to an environment outside of Earth. I believe, without any external spiritual input, that our responsibility is quite clear.
How much suffering is a function of the zero-sum game that is played in our (mostly) closed environment? Yes, expanding into space may increase the overall number of individuals suffering, but isn't it really suffering per capita that should be the measure?
Suffering isn't to be ignored and I believe seeking to reduce when possible is admirable and morally right... but to abdicate our responsibility to the process of life and allow it halt (which it will eventually on this planet)? Simply because some people feel bad about things sometimes? No, I'm not buying it for a second.
Yes, I agree, you are an idiot.
"We" don't have responsibility to the process of life, it's your animal programming overriding all logic and rationality with stupid rhetoric like entropy vs complexity and other such mindless crap.
> we're on the very lowest bottom level of the sentience hierarchy
I don't have proof of this, but I think most creatures have some amount of awareness, progressively decreasing as you descend the great chain of central nervous system complexity. Probably decreasing quickly at first, from humans to primates to regular mammals, and more slowly afterwards, until asymptotically vanishing into virtual nothingness as there's no complex nervous system to speak of anymore.
Perhaps we're at the bottom of the interval of what could be called truly self-aware consciousness, as opposed to, I don't know, maybe somnolent or lethargic or dimly awake consciousness. With that I would agree.
Which of course automatically raises the question: why should the ascending arc stop here? And what do the next levels look like? Probably impossible for us to imagine even in principle, but still.
The Montreal Protocol was a successful international treaty to protect the Ozone Layer, so there is some precedence for countries coming together to protect our environment:
I kind of disagree with this one. The number is high, but a bunch of countries haven't signed it
(As of 2016, eight Annex 2 states have not ratified the treaty: China, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the United States have signed but not ratified the Treaty; India, North Korea and Pakistan have not signed it.) [[0]
It's a prisoner's dilemma type problem. Unless you can get everybody to agree then the rational thing to do is to use as much carbon as you can to stay ahead of the other guys.
The hard limit is just that the ones who survive survive. And the reasonable people die. The reasonable are those who don't consume more resources than their environment provides.
It's not a prisoner's dilemma at all. There are plenty of humans trying to change, and several countries. Herein lies the problem with game theory - it reduces human behaviour to absurdly simplistic levels.
> Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
I think that was meant to point to the individuals, not the species as a whole and that's exactly what causes this problem. But we're working on the hive mind as we speak.
> Its pretty easy to see that any form of mitigation is irrelevant until it becomes a real problem because getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society. Usually that only occurs when its pretty apparent that they have to do something to mitigate it.
Many countries have agreed climate change is a serious problem and have acted on it, and for a long time. The U.S. is a major exception. It's doable; the Republican Party in the U.S. is the problem.
The Republican Party in the U.S. is just a proxy for the big multinational corporations. Americans didn't vote them in, they voted themselves in. They'll continue to vote themselves in as long as they can find ways to manipulate public opinion in the handful of districts where it matters.
The phenomenon that is being described where melting ice causes the release of CO2 into the atmosphere seems to have been known to climate scientists, though I don't know whether it has been included in climate change models.
There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268...) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the video, though I highly recommend watching the whole thing).
The trouser-soiling moment is when the methane clathrate ices start melting.
They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly boned.
We need that global effort to happen yesterday. It's going to be much easier to get the carbon out of the atmosphere by leveraging the already-existing carbon cycle through accelerated silicate weathering than it will be to artificially reduce atmospheric temperatures once huge amounts of methane have been released from sea ice.
Doesn't methane break down in the atmosphere fairly rapidly? From what I'm reading, methane lasts about 12 years while CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for potentially thousands.
Unless we choke to death on methane isn't this less of an issue than CO2 buildup?
On a positive note, while it may not suffice to save human civilization, CO2 likely won't get baked out of rocks. Or at least, it hasn't after previous "methane gun" events.
"While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.
In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
The fear is that the change will be so fast and so drastic that the short lifetime won't save us. It's thought that runaway methane release could result in 6+ degrees (celsius) of warming within just a few decades as massive amounts of methane are released. The influence of methane would end relatively quickly too, but the damage would be incredible.
Nobody is really sure if this would actually happen, though.
Methane does break down much faster than CO2, but over the time scales being discussed here it's MUCH more powerful. From memory so probably somewhat off it's >80x more potent a greenhouse gas over a decade, dropping to only 20x more potent when measured over a century.
The big problem is tipping points. There are a lot of things where an initial big hit can be something you don't recover from, no matter how light the impact might seem when measured over years.
The latest IPCC report does not account for Arctic methane release. There were too many variables and they decided to omit it and avoid being alarmist. This is discussed on page 28 of WG1 AR5 SPM (the final 2013 IPCC policy maker report).
"I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life."
If such feedback loops could be that dire and unavoidable, then they would already have happened direly and unavoidably. It has been this warm before, in the not-that-distant past by geological standards. If there's anything unusual about our current situation, it's the rate, not our current location. That does not mean that bad things or things we won't like can't happen, but we can't be sitting on a metaphorical bomb, or it would already have long since gone off.
Evidence suggests they already have happened several times in earth's history. You might consider doing a little research into the relationship between climate shifts and mass extinction events.
All things being equal yes, but they're not equal.
The Holocene Climate Optimum is the nearest thing in the last few hundred thousand years and it wasn't anywhere near this warm globally. What it did do though is melt the Laurentide ice sheet, dramatically raising global sea levels. But the ice sheet protected the North American continental tundra. Nowadays there's no ice sheet there any more to absorb the heat and stop the tundra melting and releasing its CO2 and methane.
Look up the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum though. That's the nearest equivalent episode to what's happening now.
IIRC they were not included in the IPCC reports, but for a different reason: even though pretty much everyone agrees that they exist, they were too difficult to quantify.
I've been saying this in and offline for years... then I realized that it just doesn't matter... we're cooked. Things will be out of control before people eve understand what really happened, as in Egypt, Tunisia, etc.
There is one potential negative feedback loop that I am now curious about, since we recently learned that Antarctica is/was highly volcanic. If the continent deforms as the mass of ice melts off of it, causing the volcanoes go off in a mega-eruption, could the atmospheric particulates shade the Earth enough to trigger an ice-age in the near future, say, 50-100 years? And if so, could we conceivably modulate the level of the particulates in order to manage the ice age?
I expect 100 years is way too short term. There's no way all that ice is going to melt that fast, the amounts of heat required would be staggering. The consequences of climate change are going to take many hundreds or thousands of years to play out.
"The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires).
That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the U.S. commercial sector in a single year."
I don't think this is specific to Alaska - there's something similar going on in Siberia and other places where melting permafrost has the potential to do serious damage.
There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us.
Alaska is only one area of the Arctic where permafrost
soils could be emitting carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. Permafrost regions in Canada and Siberia are
even vaster. But the new study’s lessons could also apply
to those areas, researchers say.
For those looking around these sources wondering how woolly mammoth populations can save us, from The Verge article:
So these Russian scientists, the Zimovs, roped up a huge section of the permafrost starting in the ‘80s and are repopulating it with these large animals: reindeer, horses, bison. They’ve been able to lower the temperature of the permafrost by as much as 15 degrees [Fahrenheit] by reintroducing large herbivores. The mammoth project is all about this. If we can introduce a mammoth herd to the tundra, we can maybe save the environment for another 100 years, because they’ll help put into place these very natural processes to keep the environment colder.
Couldn't one try to at least limit the feedback loop by spreading sulfur over the affected regions by plane? (Simulating a volcanic eruption that reflects sunlight)
Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?
This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide).
I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmosphere. China has developed a way to leave carbon in rock. Meanwhile we have had a way all along - TREES! Those and algae in the oceans.
The "answer" I often hear is that the carbon will eventually be released when the trees burn in forest fires. Well, first of all, what matters is the overall biomass of trees. And secondly even if it didn't, that buys us many decades.
Couldn't agree more. Here in the UK we have a lower percentage of forested land than many other European countries and I much prefer forest to the barren green fields which we have in many places. Sadly I think lots of my countrymen think of green fields being the default state of rural UK and don't realise it's the legacy of deforestation by stone age man.. I can only imagine what the UK must have been like prior to that. It must have been truly idyllic.
> Sadly I think lots of my countrymen think of green fields being the default state of rural UK and don't realise it's the legacy of deforestation by stone age man..
Much if not most of the deforestation in the United Kingdom took place in the Middle Ages and later, to extract resources during the Industrial Revolution. For example the Caledonian Forest in Scotland experienced massive destruction following the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries. William the Conqueror had large tracts of forested land set aside as protected parks that were later destroyed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_forests
> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?
Trees are not a carbon processing factory, they are a carbon battery. If they die the carbon will be released again during decomposition. Once they are planted they must be maintained into perpetuity, unless they are planted where they will naturally survive. Maintaining these forests will probably involve energy usage that releases more carbon.
We need method of fixation that is both permanent and does not have the constraints that tree planting does.
They don't have to be maintained into perpetuity. The trees covered a lot more of the planet when left alone. It is HUMANS that reduced the biomass of trees over the last few thousands of years. And especially last 100.
"Maintaining" the forests simply involves restraining humans from interfering. Or even better, chop the trees down and replant, using the wood for construction after fireproofing it!!
> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?
There's no money in it? Whereas there's plenty of money in deforestation.
Trees are for chumps. People should be planting grasses, and bamboo in particular.
The larger bamboo species grow faster than any tree, and can be exploited by the human economy on a shorter timescale, thus making people more likely to plant bamboo forests on their own initiative.
Grow bamboo. Cut it down. Use it for building and consumer products, such that its carbon content does not quickly return to the atmosphere as CO2 (and hopefully never as methane).
Well, I guess Russia sees a lot of reforestation-by-neglect.
This is usually useless forests and they're not very good because succession fails on them due to unbalanced ecosystem, but that's what is aplenty.
Where would you expect new forests to appear? I mean, Eurasia is so huge it probably has more forests than the rest of the planet combined. Most countries only cover a marginal area of the globe and so they can't possibly cause serious reforestation impace.
We are. The lumber and paper companies replant all the time. Sometimes directly, sometimes they don't have to because natural processes will do it. Many forests in the US are over populated.
There is a lot of land that cannot support a forest though.
Where we really go wrong is not lighting forest fires every year. As a result dead trees build up until the slightest spark (lightening) results in a hot fire that burns up everything in a massive fire that cannot be controlled. All the carbon turns back into CO2. If instead we lit a fire every year the smaller cooler fire would result in a lot of carbon that isn't turned into CO2 and just sits on the ground. The result is sequestered carbon in the form of charcoal.
fireproofing wood generally involves toxic chemicals you don't want. Historically these chemicals have been found to offgas long after they are thought safe.
It also isn't worth it because one cheap way to get rid of a house after the end of its useful life is burn it.
But we... but um... the whole point is to NOT release the CO2 back into the atmosphere. "Cheap" way to undermine the whole point! "Not worth it to fireproof"? This is actually pretty funny.
Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2]. Methane also has a stronger effect than CO2. If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.
Here's the next line from your [1] link that's pretty crazy as well.
"They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve"
I think they've tried to convert those 50Gt into palatable comparisons: It equals to a 2 additional degrees increase of global warming, or reaching the 2100 temperature in 2080. But we're talking about methane – the original article was about CO2.
Also, ice reflects light back out into space, meaning we absorb more of it and the heat that gets generated from absorbing it, as the ice melts.
It's safe to say we're soundly screwed, and probably were screwed before we could realistically do anything about it. Anything we do now short of killing off 80% of the population and the other 20% living like native tribes men, won't have any real affect, it might slow it. Unless we come up with some solution the counter the feedback mechanisms and extract/recapture these gases from the atmosphere.
The atmospheric carbon situation is not good, and we (as a species) need to come up with actionable geo-engineering solutions. Here is one.
Rainwater hits mountains and dissolves silicate minerals into cations that flow into rivers and then oceans. The oceans naturally uptake carbon from the atmosphere by reacting atmospheric carbon with cations in the water that come from those dissolved silicate minerals. This uptake de-acidifies the oceans and produces food for ocean life; for us to collect all the carbon produced in the USA last year, we would need to crush about 60km^3 of silicate rock (which is in abundance) and spread it along coastlines.
To successful sequester enough carbon to save the ecosystem, this might one of the best options we have. This paper [1] does a good job of explaining what I've touched on here.
This is a very interesting proposal. Hopefully this will become part of the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks because we were out of time yesterday" strategy.
New real-estate becomes available in the SF Bay, but only golf courses are approved for construction. Commuters continue to drive all the way around the old shoreline because internal roads are designed in a vascular pattern to thwart Waze drivers.
You can get rid of solar shade any moment you don't like it, in this respect it's an awesome solution compared to anything we do on earth and then stuck with.
Look at it this way. A large swath of people believe it is a problem and most of them are willing to put time and money in counteracting it. We have leaders like Elon Musk already creating a great response. We can't winnow out of it alone but we already have leaders & a large group of people interested in fixing it.
The answer to "what now" is start a company that is in the business of carbon sequestration or climate affect mitigation and become a leader. It's obvious!
Consider how lucky we are to even have spent any time at all to reach a point in the cosmos to make this realization. Even if humanity manages to survive past this problem, there are many more including the overconsumption of the world's finite resources. Perhaps it is inevitable given a biological imperative to be selfish. Our means of survival in future generations may be determined by our ability to adapt to withering resources, reuse of existing and exploring space for more. Consider the issue of water reuse; some amount of research suggests that graphene filters when they come to fruition may help with far more reuse and recycle of water. Other work such as the electric transport systems, high speed hyperloops, and 3D print manufacturing combined with a closed loop system may help bring down massive resource waste. There is a lot of tech to be hopeful of but it won't be all positive. Many of it seems to be adaptations to a world which is constantly at risk for extinction
That's probably so however Siberia is contributing much more. The whole of subarctic tundra is at risk for rapid melting and co2 and methane release as trapped ancient organic material decays. There are also other major, imminent issues: the uncertain liability of the ESAS clathrates, zero summer sea ice (arctic ocean heating) and jetstream abnormalities (hence more variable weather day-to-day).
Anyone whom wants actual facts ought to watch Paul Beckwith out of University of Ottawa on YT for detailed updates and analysis on climate change.
Citation? How long is the lag? Years? How long does it take to fill a bathtub? If so much ice is really, actually melting in the world and has been for years; no shoreline changes have occurred anywhere in the world, then that must be some amazing lag.
The ice that's melting today is floating ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, because it's subject to warm ocean currents. Floating ice doesn't change sea levels when it melts. The ice that matters is the glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Glaciers weren't formed in a day, and they won't melt in a day either.
That is correct. Glaciers melt constantly, new snow forms as moisture accumulates in higher elevations and condenses, falling as snow. The snow becomes the beginning of the glacier. It's a cycle that repeats. It is repeating right now, every year.
What sort of effect does this increased CO2 have on the plant life in the area? Do they benefit from the increased CO2 leading to more plants/trees, etc?
Probably the asteroid Apophis, due to hit the Earth in 2029, will cause enough cooling to prevent most clathrate from melting. If that works we have a nearby supply of small asteroids that we can fire at the Earth to deepen the winter effect. It works best if you hit a shallow coastal shelf area with lots of limestone rock. Maybe we will sacrifice the Caribbean?
A cursory glance at Wikipedia disagrees. It was probably a comment made in jest but if most of the readership doesn't get the joke, it's probably not working as intended.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 416 ms ] threadhttp://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/08/22/permafrost-thawing-faster...
And they're citing an April 2017 published paper: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n5/full/nclimate32...
"Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-a...
The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by a couple feet over the next 2 hundred years.
That's the science. Doesn't sound like doomsday to me.
> It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century.
When someone can rationally talk about what will happen in the IPCC predicted scenarios, which is the scientific consensus, then I will listen to them.
If you are some crank, who is talking about 1000 parts per million of C02, and 10 degrees C temp increase by 2100, well then you shouldn't be taken seriously.
The doomsday scenarios may be uncertain, but they do not (to my layman's understand) seem impossible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
The part you may want starts around footnote 20, in a paragraph that notes 4 degrees as a median projection from the IPCC, with up to 8 degrees at the high end of the curve without factoring in permafrost melt and its associated carbon release or any of a variety of other exacerbating factors (footnoted in the article).
There are ways to calculate how much effort or expense is reasonable to attempt to mitigate a risk, I believe that's often part of the job description of actuaries. Part of it involves figuring out what the cost is if the event in question happens, then what the likelihood of the event is.
For example, it explicitly mentions 10 degrees C of warming over the next century.
A 10 degrees C scenario is not something that any respectable scientist believes is going to happen.
The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be a 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century.
Thats the facts. Please listen to the scientists. Every single doomsday prediction that this guy is making, can be traced back to this fundamental problem that he is talking about scenarios that the experts and the scientists do NOT believe has even a remote chance of happening.
"a sufficiently large warming (roughly estimated as 5–6 ◦C, see Robinson 2000) would inevitably lead to an ecological disaster resulting in a complete depletion of oxygen."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
Why try one scheme when you can try two at twice the price?
That is the definition of research. Once something is discovered that works, it is called development.
> In this situation throwing money at the problem simply isn't the solution.
Why is funding fundamental physics research a bad idea?
> Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
Technology does not solve anything "for us," we choose to develop and apply technology. We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research.
It's not a bad idea and we are doing it. Fundamental research into fusion is happening on many fronts. That is a good thing and I am not arguing against it. There may even be good arguments to increase funding on some of those approaches.
I'm saying that a 'huge' increase in funding, as proposed, at this stage would be premature given that there are plenty of other alternative power technologies that are proving very effective. We already spend billions of dollars on fusion research. If we're going to spend huge amounts of extra funding on power generation, there are better ways to use it right now.
>We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research
What do you think we should hugely cut spending on in order to fund this huge increase? Proposals to spend lots of money on this or that are somewhat unconvincing unless you can explain where the money should come from.
That is actually the easy part. Latest numbers I have seen are from 2009, when the US government paid farmers $5 billion to waste their time growing corn to turn into ethanol (basically to turn 1 barrel of oil into 0.7 barrels of oil equivalent), and paid oil and gas companies $7 billion in oil and gas exploration subsidies. Enough money for huge increases in both renewable energy and fusion research programs:
http://www.eli.org/sites/default/files/eli-pubs/d19_07.pdf
Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.
> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference.
Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.
The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]:
Your misunderstanding is apparently common enough that the last assertion is offered in the context of dispelling a myth.[1] https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...
Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier.
The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels.
Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.
I assume you refer to Rick Perry. In point of fact the myth/reality portion of the page has been unchanged since at least September of 2015 [1], at which time Obama appointee Ernest Moniz was Secretary of Energy. Dr. Moniz has never denied the fact that the climate is changing, as far as I'm aware.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150912221729/https://www.netl....
The important part is that anthropogenic sources are a significant contribution to the net imbalance of those flows, because it's all in one direction.
It's like arguing that your spending, because is a small fraction of the amount of money you move between your checkings and savings accounts, won't make you run out of money...
Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.
Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.
The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.
It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.
If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.
And yes, it's the latter: formalized debt records that meet the 3 criteria we commonly define money by.
Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.
My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.
But it's sure becoming a popular theory.
Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...
Are you saying that human-caused global warming is a hoax?
It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.
Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.
Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.
Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.
Optimize the whole system. Localized optimization leads to decreased overall efficiency.
That's a broad generalization and far simpler model than what the poster is referring to.
Yes, riding a motorcycle instead of an SUV decreases all emissions. This is the simple base case.
However driving a diesel SUV decreases CO2 but increases NOx wrt to a gasoline one. This is the higher-order effect.
"Amplifiers that oscillate and oscillators that won't are the two great fears of analog designers."
Technically an amplifier with a feedback mechanism can become an oscillator and if you break the feedback loop in an oscillator you end up with 'just' an amplifier.
To make this even more interesting: a negative feedback element in an amplifier will greatly enhance the frequency response at the expense of amplification (and will vastly reduce the chances of that amplifier turning into an oscillator).
Is that what you were saying? You're getting downvotes because your first statement, while technically true, isn't very profound. Natural carbon emissions were counterbalanced by natural carbon storage.
But that might not be true if our additional emissions have triggered enough feedback loops.
We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years.
This of course led to a feedback loop.
Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
[2]: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions
For civilization to survive, we must adapt, mitigate, or both.
Thats the science. And it doesn't sound like extinction to me.
Yes, extinction seems unlikely. But the planet's ability to support the current population could easily be a casualty.
But since we pushed the system to a new state, its net emissions may dwarf our own emissions. Then things get even harder.
It's already happening. Natalia Shakhova has been studying this for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSsPHytEnJM
This is technically true, but I think it misses the point.
It's like complaining about Jeff Bezos being financially irresponsible because he bought a yacht. It might be financially irresponsible for you or me to buy a yacht, but Jeff Bezos's bank account is much bigger, and refills much more rapidly.
It's true that the natural carbon cycle involves a lot of sequestered carbon being released into the air, but nature actually consumes a little bit more carbon than it emits. If we left the natural carbon cycle alone, atmospheric carbon would decline.
Human industry is fundamentally the opposite. We emit CO2, but we don't sequester it in any significant way. Nature may pump more CO2 into the air than we do, but it also absorbs far more than we do. In fact, once nature consumes all of its own CO2, it consumes roughly 40% of what we put out there. The remaining 60% of our output is why atmospheric carbon keeps increasing.
One theory is that agriculture prevented another mini-ice age. I don't know where in the "believe, but cannot prove" spectrum this theory lies (a la http://edge.org).
"Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate."
Complex adaptive systems. Disrupt a system's equilibrium and you get chaos. Hard to predict, mitigate.
Sadly true on so many levels.
Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
Compared to what? I think you should be happy with what you've got, because it's the best we've ever seen. I'm happier with a species that could burn out, than one that could do no wrong. If there was a problem, yo, we'll solve it.
I mean, you never know when you might need it, right? :)
The problem is that there is no game theoretic advantage in cooperating to reduce CO2 unless everyone cooperates. If one large player (e.g. USA or China) or many small players do not cooperate then the incentive flips and it's actually in everyone's best interest to defect. If catastrophic climate change is going to happen anyway then you are better off burning as much CO2 as you want to build up your economy so you have a better chance of mitigating the damage. It's basically a variation on the prisoner's dilemma scenario.
At the moment we're a tribal species that builds colonies, we just haven't evolved to fit into them yet.
In evolutionary terms we have literally only just managed to build a technological society. Therefore it stands to reason we only recently evolved sufficient intelligence to do so. Otherwise we'd have done it sooner. In the grand scheme of things we're on the very lowest bottom level of the sentience hierarchy.
If there happen to be any other sentient species watching us, I can only assume they spend most of the time face-palming, head-shaking and eye-rolling.
Or they see us as a natural phenomenon following similar patterns to other fledgling civilizations. We don't roll our eyes when a pathogen is so virulent it kills its host before it propagates.
We'd probably still be a dinosaur-populated planet if not for a random asteroid.
I'm personally not invested in the environment-preservation fight at all.
Life exists in this universe, it's a part it's nature and so is consciousness. Whether by design or by some random chance, it is self-evident that it exists. Not only that, you can find it adapted to the extremes of every environment it encounters.
Suffering is the engine of adaptation and everything we consider valuable has only come about through the immense suffering and sacrifice of those that have lived.
We, as conscious life, are the only known species which have the possibility to adapt to an environment outside of Earth. I believe, without any external spiritual input, that our responsibility is quite clear.
How much suffering is a function of the zero-sum game that is played in our (mostly) closed environment? Yes, expanding into space may increase the overall number of individuals suffering, but isn't it really suffering per capita that should be the measure?
Suffering isn't to be ignored and I believe seeking to reduce when possible is admirable and morally right... but to abdicate our responsibility to the process of life and allow it halt (which it will eventually on this planet)? Simply because some people feel bad about things sometimes? No, I'm not buying it for a second.
I don't have proof of this, but I think most creatures have some amount of awareness, progressively decreasing as you descend the great chain of central nervous system complexity. Probably decreasing quickly at first, from humans to primates to regular mammals, and more slowly afterwards, until asymptotically vanishing into virtual nothingness as there's no complex nervous system to speak of anymore.
Perhaps we're at the bottom of the interval of what could be called truly self-aware consciousness, as opposed to, I don't know, maybe somnolent or lethargic or dimly awake consciousness. With that I would agree.
Which of course automatically raises the question: why should the ascending arc stop here? And what do the next levels look like? Probably impossible for us to imagine even in principle, but still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
Smallpox, eradication of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication
Perhaps that indicates that reason itself has some hardcoded fundamental limits.
I think that was meant to point to the individuals, not the species as a whole and that's exactly what causes this problem. But we're working on the hive mind as we speak.
Many countries have agreed climate change is a serious problem and have acted on it, and for a long time. The U.S. is a major exception. It's doable; the Republican Party in the U.S. is the problem.
There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268...) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the video, though I highly recommend watching the whole thing).
They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly boned.
Unless we choke to death on methane isn't this less of an issue than CO2 buildup?
0) http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7739.full.pdf
1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/dayearthdied.shtml
In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
Nobody is really sure if this would actually happen, though.
The big problem is tipping points. There are a lot of things where an initial big hit can be something you don't recover from, no matter how light the impact might seem when measured over years.
If such feedback loops could be that dire and unavoidable, then they would already have happened direly and unavoidably. It has been this warm before, in the not-that-distant past by geological standards. If there's anything unusual about our current situation, it's the rate, not our current location. That does not mean that bad things or things we won't like can't happen, but we can't be sitting on a metaphorical bomb, or it would already have long since gone off.
That's a strange argument given that previous variations in climate indeed were very severe...
The Holocene Climate Optimum is the nearest thing in the last few hundred thousand years and it wasn't anywhere near this warm globally. What it did do though is melt the Laurentide ice sheet, dramatically raising global sea levels. But the ice sheet protected the North American continental tundra. Nowadays there's no ice sheet there any more to absorb the heat and stop the tundra melting and releasing its CO2 and methane.
Look up the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum though. That's the nearest equivalent episode to what's happening now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Max...
That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the U.S. commercial sector in a single year."
There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us.
- http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes-new-...
- https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben-mezri...
So these Russian scientists, the Zimovs, roped up a huge section of the permafrost starting in the ‘80s and are repopulating it with these large animals: reindeer, horses, bison. They’ve been able to lower the temperature of the permafrost by as much as 15 degrees [Fahrenheit] by reintroducing large herbivores. The mammoth project is all about this. If we can introduce a mammoth herd to the tundra, we can maybe save the environment for another 100 years, because they’ll help put into place these very natural processes to keep the environment colder.
Also, I hear nuclear winter is really 'cool'. We could always start a war in Korea...
This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide).
I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmosphere. China has developed a way to leave carbon in rock. Meanwhile we have had a way all along - TREES! Those and algae in the oceans.
The "answer" I often hear is that the carbon will eventually be released when the trees burn in forest fires. Well, first of all, what matters is the overall biomass of trees. And secondly even if it didn't, that buys us many decades.
PS: How come this is being so heavily downvoted?
Much if not most of the deforestation in the United Kingdom took place in the Middle Ages and later, to extract resources during the Industrial Revolution. For example the Caledonian Forest in Scotland experienced massive destruction following the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries. William the Conqueror had large tracts of forested land set aside as protected parks that were later destroyed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_forests
The prevailing political and economic system.
We need method of fixation that is both permanent and does not have the constraints that tree planting does.
https://qz.com/1010273/the-algoland-carbon-capture-project-i...
(wood burning power plant is the second subject, under How to heat a cold country in the 21st century section)
"Maintaining" the forests simply involves restraining humans from interfering. Or even better, chop the trees down and replant, using the wood for construction after fireproofing it!!
There's no money in it? Whereas there's plenty of money in deforestation.
Tragic, but that is the world we live in.
The larger bamboo species grow faster than any tree, and can be exploited by the human economy on a shorter timescale, thus making people more likely to plant bamboo forests on their own initiative.
Grow bamboo. Cut it down. Use it for building and consumer products, such that its carbon content does not quickly return to the atmosphere as CO2 (and hopefully never as methane).
Pulling the above off in an energy positive way is left as an exercise to the reader. (read I am not sure you can, but I wish you would)
This is usually useless forests and they're not very good because succession fails on them due to unbalanced ecosystem, but that's what is aplenty.
Where would you expect new forests to appear? I mean, Eurasia is so huge it probably has more forests than the rest of the planet combined. Most countries only cover a marginal area of the globe and so they can't possibly cause serious reforestation impace.
There is a lot of land that cannot support a forest though.
Where we really go wrong is not lighting forest fires every year. As a result dead trees build up until the slightest spark (lightening) results in a hot fire that burns up everything in a massive fire that cannot be controlled. All the carbon turns back into CO2. If instead we lit a fire every year the smaller cooler fire would result in a lot of carbon that isn't turned into CO2 and just sits on the ground. The result is sequestered carbon in the form of charcoal.
It also isn't worth it because one cheap way to get rid of a house after the end of its useful life is burn it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions#Contr...
[2]: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions
"They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve"
It's safe to say we're soundly screwed, and probably were screwed before we could realistically do anything about it. Anything we do now short of killing off 80% of the population and the other 20% living like native tribes men, won't have any real affect, it might slow it. Unless we come up with some solution the counter the feedback mechanisms and extract/recapture these gases from the atmosphere.
Rainwater hits mountains and dissolves silicate minerals into cations that flow into rivers and then oceans. The oceans naturally uptake carbon from the atmosphere by reacting atmospheric carbon with cations in the water that come from those dissolved silicate minerals. This uptake de-acidifies the oceans and produces food for ocean life; for us to collect all the carbon produced in the USA last year, we would need to crush about 60km^3 of silicate rock (which is in abundance) and spread it along coastlines.
To successful sequester enough carbon to save the ecosystem, this might one of the best options we have. This paper [1] does a good job of explaining what I've touched on here.
[1]http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf
@
Sea levels drop.
b) What secondary / tertiary / ... / n-th order effects would that have? I'm guessing you don't know.
http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Council_Proposals
and we have no leadership to guide our response.
and we can't winnow our way out of this alone.
what now?
The answer to "what now" is start a company that is in the business of carbon sequestration or climate affect mitigation and become a leader. It's obvious!
Anyone whom wants actual facts ought to watch Paul Beckwith out of University of Ottawa on YT for detailed updates and analysis on climate change.
https://youtube.com/user/PaulHBeckwith
Hell if you want a good scaremongering, there are some old Van Impe videos around somewhere.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/AK/3_rid/waterfront_at...
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/life-glacier.html
https://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/11/Pio_XI_Glaci...