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Comment by jakeogh | Hacker News Reader

Nice visualization from NASA: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-...

Beautiful. I'd love to have seen it in an equal-area projection, though. The high concentrations are disproportionately in the high latitudes where area is stretched, so I think the yearly variation would look a little less ominous that way.

Anyway, I hope one day we can get a new Sim Earth with this style of simulation and presentation.

Here's another visualization by Oregon State University, similar to the video but with a navigable equal-area map :

http://co2.digitalcartography.org/

Wow, that's even better :)

I recall seeing a long-term (from roughly 18,000 BCE to 3000 CE) visualization of ice-cover, ground cover, and sea level, with numbers on the side showing CO2, human population, and population below current sea level. I recall CO2 less than 200 PPM during the last glaciation, and I think this projection showed a peak around 560 PPM, before gradually declining. Sea levels kept going up though, given the assumptions in this scenario.

But I can't find it again. Anyone know about this?

Am I reading the visualization right that CO2 practically disappears every summer? Wouldn't it logically follow then that we're not actually too late to fix our CO2 levels? If we can reduce emissions, plant consumption during the summer months for the northern hemisphere appears to be incredibly effective at basically demolishing the built-up CO2.

Or is the "too late" aspect more about the melting polar caps, and that they'd not rebuild quickly?

> Am I reading the visualization right that CO2 practically disappears every summer?

No. The concentration does drop seasonally, but not even close to zero. See:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Click on the "full record" tab and note that the Y axis starts at 320 (compared to the preindustrial level of 270).

The seasonal drop is about 5PPM, and we're at about 400 now, roughly 50% over pre-industrial levels. There are seasonal natural emissions as well. Even if we cut artificial emissions to zero it would still take the better part of a century (maybe even several centuries) to get back down to preindustrial CO2 levels.

We can fix this, we can take the carbon out of the atmosphere [1]. There is reason for optimism. We. Are. Not. Doomed. The optimum level of carbon is probably slightly above pre-industrial levels. We definitely need to get back below 350ppm to keep human civilization... civilized.

400ppm+ is a trajectory to anarchy. The chimpanzee raiding impulse is alive and well in our DNA, a survival adaptation for stagnation and decline.

We have the technology, bio-energy with carbon capture and sequestration, its a scaling problem, but first we have to stop pumping so much carbon up into the air. We have made progress there as well:

1) Cheap Solar PV has arrived, growth has been exponential for two decades. [2]

2) Energy storage is possible. Think underground maglev trains, on circular tracks, working as massive flywheels.

3) Fusion is attainable in the time frame we need it in, if we increase research funding, but its not required. That said if we cracked fusion, we would have all the energy we would need to desalinate seawater and sequester carbon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

Why not just massive flywheels? What's the benefit of having a train go over tracks instead of having a large solid wheel?

Maybe bearing scale-up issues?

Yup that's all true. But when the next president of the largest economy either doesn't believe in climate change or wants to increase fracking then we clearly have a long way to go before change happens.

Both party candidates believe in fracking. Not sure how we lower our CO levels while fracking is the new coal.

Coal releases far more carbon than natural gas.

>...Energy storage is possible.

Possible, but except for pumped hydro, it looks like still a lot of work needs to be done.

>...3) Fusion is attainable in the time frame we need it in, if we increase research funding, but its not required. That said if we cracked fusion, we would have all the energy we would need to desalinate seawater and sequester carbon.

I am not sure if fusion is attainable in the time frame needed or it would be economically viable in that timeframe. With fission we have working reactors right now and with a little more research effort we could soon have 4th generation reactors. With reactor designs like the integral fast reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) there would be enough potential electrical generating capacity to last the world thousands of years. (Of course we should also keep investing in fusion research and energy storage.)

Breeder reactors like fast neutron reactor main advantage is less radioactive waste, there is enough of uranium in world to feed the old light water reactors for thousands of years too, but they produce lot of radioactive waste which could be used as fuel and inactivated in breeder reactors.

>Breeder reactors like fast neutron reactor main advantage is less radioactive waste,

Generally they will also have more passive safety features and in the case of something like the IFR, an even smaller chance of proliferation. Less nuclear waste might be the most important issue to most people though.

>... there is enough of uranium in world to feed the old light water reactors for thousands of years too

True, looks like I was really using the wrong units of time. Scientific American had an article where they estimated a 60,000 year supply at current rates. If we switched to the world using breeder reactors, probably more like hundreds of thousands or millions of years of fuel depending on the growth rate you use for consumption.

You're on the right track, but ditch fusion and flywheels. It'll be battery storage, wind, and solar:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-13/we-ve-almo...

And plain old demand shifting.

What's demand shifting?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

Basically, instead of just relying on batteries, consumers of power can often also shift when they are going to consume the power. Spot markets and future markets can help here.

We already see that in industrial applications, where you can get power very cheaply, if you can tolerate arbitrary power cuts during peak hours.

> That said if we cracked fusion, we would have all the energy we would need to desalinate seawater and sequester carbon.

I've not heard this before. How does desalinating seawater help with sequestering carbon?

I think grandfather commenter is more worried about clean freshwater here. (A scarcity of clean freshwater might be one of the consequences of changing the climate and thus the water cycle.)

"The optimum level of carbon..."

Such a human thing to say.

Between that, and all the top comments as of writing this start out addressing how beautiful the data visualization is. That is why humans are doomed.

Mother nature is fine with or without us.

Short answer: There are more trees and other green stuff in the northern hemisphere. As the planet tilts relative to the sun the north/south get more of the light and warmth that helps plants grow. So there is a seasonal up and down to CO2 levels. It's been around for millions of years. What is new is the increased average.

Unfortunately, plants do not sequester much CO2 long term. Instead, the CO2 gets released back to the atmosphere as plants die off.

Unless you bury the plants. That's what happened to create coal and oil.

The problem of too much CO2 in the atmosphere will solve itself in a few thousand years: the ocean currents will sequester lots of carbon in the depths of the sea. Of course, people alive today and their children and grand-children don't want to wait for so long.

I think the time frames for returning to pre-human levels is longer than a few thousand years [1, 2].

1. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-lo...

2. http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.12...

Thanks. Sorry, I was going from memory here.

In any case, it'll happen by itself, but it's longer than humans can afford to wait.

Yes that is certainly true.

"I think we're going to be a planet covered in trees. I wonder what that would be like". https://youtu.be/YxJLyPSRusc?t=52m4s

The NASA video is very pretty, but the scale is like a line chart where the y-axis doesn't start at zero -- it's picked to most vividly distinguish minute changes in CO2 concentrations.

The linked WaPo article has a chart which is much less pretty, but much more informative and significantly more troubling. [1]

What you see from the zoomed-out historical chart is the variations throughout the year which produced such a beautiful visualization are little more than cute rounding errors in the steady yearly increases in atmospheric CO2 which have brought us from ~320 ppm in 1960 to 400ppm today.

"Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to rise even though global greenhouse gas emissions from industry may be leveling off somewhat, the study adds — because each year still represents a net addition to the atmosphere, and carbon dioxide is a very long-lived greenhouse gas. Thus, even by 2050, the researchers don’t think we’ll find any way of getting back below 400 ppm."

[1] https://img.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp-co...

More importantly, the NASA video is only for a single year (2006). The chart from WaPo that you linked clearly shows the problem with looking at only a single year of data.

That is neat. It looks like fire. Probably intentionally ;)

That is fascinating - Any idea how this was made?

It's a simulation based on ground measurement.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11719

Now we have: http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/ (2014)

Not entirely sure, but could be using the data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite[0].

This satellite orbits the Earth on the order of ~16 times per day which would not be enough granularity for the smoothness of this video, so I assume it's been combined with other weather data and advanced modelling to provide the smooth interpolation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory

OCO blew up on launch, but OCO-2, its successor, has been producing data since 2014. This nature run was from 2006, which predates the OCO-2 era, and predates GOSAT, another CO2 satellite. It may overlap partly with SCIAMACHY, an ESA mission.

But in summary, I don't think the video was heavily constrained by actual CO2 observations, which are done only at a small number of sites on the ground (TCCON or FTIR). The video was probably constructed based on models of plant respiration (which is observed, indirectly, by remote sensing), winds (ditto, of course), and ground emitters.

OCO-2 has offered more significant constraints on global CO2, with a roughly 2km x 2km footprint (per pixel), 1ppm accuracy (in a ~400 ppm quantity), and global coverage every 16 days. There are some videos of observations (not models) at:

http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/Videos/

OCO didn't blow up on launch. The payload fairing failed to separate. The vehicle couldn't reach orbit.

Doesn't really impact what you're saying (nor does it alleviate the massive embarrassment of Orbital Sciences).

Sloppy of me! You're right, of course. I knew people who went to see the launch at Vandenberg, and (being on the science team) they were crushed [edited to clarify: metaphorically! -- having spent so much hard work in preparation for eventual results] just a few minutes after launch, so I put it into the wrong mental category.

"crushed"?

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