Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release
insideclimatenews.org
insideclimatenews.org
Water happens to have one of the highest, and I would argue, the most important thermal capacity of all the compounds we're likely to come into contact with daily. Water has about 5-10x the heat capacity of most common things and so heating up the all the oceans by say 2 degs average is an ENORMOUS amount of energy.
Why is this important? The reason we have climate refugees today is not the water level but rather the higher intensity storms that the warmer waters spawn. Far before ppl are forced from the shores by rising waters they will be forced from the shores by massive, frequent, destructive storms that, instead of say destroying 1/1000 homes, will destroy 1/100. Eventually it will be economically non-viable to live in storm-prone zones. And those zones will increase in size over time to go far inland (away from fresh water), causing more migration.
This is happening NOW and will be a major factor in the lives of all our children.
It's easy for ppl to dismiss rising sea levels because it doesn't seem dangerous and happens over decades. It's far harder for ppl to dismiss weather disasters that they might have some first or second handed experience of or, more likely, a visceral fear of.
Maybe we should have a different metric? So instead of sea rise/year we should have expected floridian homes destroyed/year.
I wouldn't be shocked if cat five hurricanes became pretty common in a couple of decades due to warmer waters, and one or two of those a year would devastate coastal economies.
But I'm not a weatherman...
Here's a page with good, updated information about global warming and hurricanes: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
I read no condescension in it.
Though the timescale will likely be on the order of decades or centuries, not 20 years.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080314-warmi...
So we do have proof of weather changes causing earthquakes.
Though I doubt anyone has data or models that would be useful for this tangent. At least for oceanic fault lines, which could be affected by ocean rise.
>The intensity, frequency and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes, as well as the frequency of the strongest (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes, have all increased since the early 1980s. The relative contributions of human and natural causes to these increases are still uncertain. Hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates are projected to increase as the climate continues to warm.
"It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity."
So no detectable increase (even statistically, which I consider to be a much weaker requirement than actual subjective experience).
[0] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
"Numerous data quality checks were used in this study, as noted above, and there are no known systematic errors in the observations or analyses that would be likely to produce the decreasing trend in TC #s examined here. This suggests the possibility that the downward trend may be associated with changes in environmental conditions. Studies such as Emanuel (2005) indicate that the changes in various different environmental conditions that are occurring due to anthropogenic influences are having an influence on TC activity in some regions of the world. In the Australian region, one possible physical explanation for a decreasing trend in TC #s could be a potential long-term shift in environmental conditions towards a more El Niño-like state, given that fewer TCs tend to occur in the Australian region during El Niño than La Niña conditions. Although the NIN and SOI data used here did not show a significant long-term trend, some studies suggest the possibility of a shift towards more El Niño-like conditions, relating to a possible weakening of the Walker circulation due to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (Vecchi et al., 2006; Power and Smith, 2007; Huang et al., 2013; DiNezio et al., 2013). However, it is also noted that considerable uncertainty exists in observed changes to the Walker circulation based on reanalyses (Compo et al., 2011)."
Therefore insurance premiums or losses may be difficult to compare year to year. Certainly insurances companies have factored global warming into their models and are changing their rates accordingly. To not do so would be grounds for shareholder lawsuits I should think.
There are as many climate deniers in insurance companies as there are atheists in foxholes. :>
[1] http://evanmills.lbl.gov/pubs/pdf/climate-action-insurance.p...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/04/science/globa...
Your energy argument doesn't add up. Increasing the thermal energy of everything in a system doesn't make it able to do more work (violent storms). Storms are driven by heat flowing from hot to cold. Not from hot to also-hot. If you show that temperature differences between parts of the ocean/atmosphere are going to become more extreme, then more severe storms would make sense. That could be caused by cold things getting colder or hot things getting hotter.
This is hardly the kind of migration we're talking about. Come on... a bit of intellectual honesty goes a long way.
It's going going to be a lot worse, by an order of magnitude, than the current war refugee migrant crises currently in Europe, and will be happening globally at that.
It's possible to build homes that are much more resistant to storms than current homes [1], although they cost more than the currently most popular designs. Wouldn't a shift to such homes keep it viable to live in those storm-prone zones?
[1] http://www.deltechomes.com/learn-more/hurricane-resistance/
With time, you're also looking at massively increased erosion. It's hard to have a house if there's no land under it at all.
Replacing 10 of these costs 1 million - but let's be generous and assume that you need to do this every 6 years, and use a 30-year period for our analysis. That brings our total cost to $105 million. If all the new homes survive undamaged, you have to build 1000 hurricane-resistant homes for less than $105 million to make the project viable, an increase of 5%. Looking briefly at that page, none of those features look particularly cheap. You'd probably burn your $5000 on just finishing the underside of the floor joists to elevate the home on those pilings, to say nothing of their fancy shapes or high-spec materials.
Algae will probably avail of the increased CO2 concentrations as well.
Essentially, low temperatures have allowed vast quantities of methane and carbon dioxide containing compounds to accumulate for millennia. If the temperatures rise above a critical threshold, a positive feedback loop would exist between temperatures and global warming.
Positive feedback loops are scary.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
What surprised me is that the science comes at this from multiple angles, so even if someone were to dispute the computer models, then we have other lines of science that still back the theories, e.g. looking at the environment over geologic time scales where we can see what the climate was like under certain CO2 levels.
https://theconversation.com/study-predicts-multi-meter-sea-l...
Do you have an example of where his research is wrong or his conclusions were overly pessimistic?
- that there is anyone lurking on HN who is able to argue on this topic as authoritatively as James Hansen and
- that such a person would be willing to educate you here.
You might try
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+is+james+hansen+wrong%3F
or
When it does speak to the science (the first result refutes a 1988 paper), it seems a quick validation shows that his predications were not correct in 2010 when the article was written, but his prediction is inline with current temperatures reported.
So, yeh, I did look into this already, and haven't found a good critique. So, rather than blindly repeat claims that Hansen is wrong or an alarmist, I urge you to critically read the topic before spreading others lies further.
Your mashable link is a summary of a piece from Glover Park Group, in their own words they turn 'strategies into outcomes', so they seem to be a firm that gets paid to shape public opinion. For that reason alone we should dismiss the messenger.
While your 'the conversation.com' link seems broken, but searching on their site for Hansen returns a first result that is critical of carbon tax programs, seemingly favoring emissions trading. Yet, emissions trading is largely seen as benefiting banks to give them a new financial instrument to trade while not actually reducing carbon emissions. So, I'm left somewhat skeptical about conclusions coming from that site as well.
What I'd rather see is a critique of Hansen's papers coming from the scientific community. I would give that an honest read and open consideration.
https://judithcurry.com/2015/07/26/hansens-backfire/
Lol. Don't read the comments, while i find judith to be above board, many of her fans are definitely rabid troglodytes.
Actually, the biggest danger is that political instability brought on by climate change will lead to nuclear war. That would be much worse than losing civilization to climate change because it would happen much faster, essentially instantaneously. That is not at all unlikely even under much more modest warming scenarios.
I'm sure walls are an option, but they will be expensive to maintain and it doesn't take much to have big consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drainage_in_New_Orleans
If that's the bar for civilization ending, then civilization ended when people came to the US, ended again when they expanded out to the West, etc.
Just because people on the US coasts move means little to the 60 percent of citizens that don't live near the ocean.
And again, it's not going to happen overnight. A wall of water isn't coming in that will force everyone to put their things in a car and go. It will be slow build-up that slowly forces people out as they decide it's to expensive to mitigate.
Interesting that your example is literally true both times for the people who where there earlier.
[1] http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/methodolog...
This is definitely not true for the US. At least not by any global notion of political instability. The US government isn't near collapse, there is a very limited likelihood of any kind of coup, the economy is doing very well, and riots have been very rare.
There is a lot of political bickering, but it doesn't seem to be any more-so than during the last party-in-the-office changes (Clinton to Bush, Bush to Obama).
A seawall isn't just a wall, it's more like a dike if it is to survive and that means it has a width many times larger than it's height.
And then there is seepage to contend with. This is anything but a trivial problem and we have never done engineering on that scale before.
The easiest solution would be to move to higher ground.
The good news is that runaway greenhouse warming won't evaporate oceans and bake out CO2 from surface rocks :)
But homo sapiens will probably survive, and so civilization will probably eventually be rebuilt
Just because humans are slightly more clever than past dominant species doesn't make us any less extinction-proof.
Ants, individually, are stupid. Collectively, they're intelligent, and solve complex problems.
Humans, individually, are brilliant (by animal standards). Collectively, not so much.
Cleverness is a huge advantage in the survival game.
Edit: one way humans will extinctionize our species:
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-scientists-categorize-earth-to...
We're basically driving this car full speed towards the cliff. No amount of cleverness will stop this.
Can you please elaborate on this point?
The Green Revolution was through picking all the low-hanging fruit - hybrid crops and synthetic fertilizers. Increasing yield to match demand is already looking like an issue without the effect of catastrophic climate change. Other issues occurring in the next 20-30 years include encroachment of cities into prime arable land, land degradation, and increased cost/reduced availability of phosphorous fertilizers.
It's a massive issue that barely registers on the public conscience, and we may hit the perfect storm soon, particularly if a new nasty rust or plant virus pops up on the scene at the same time.
On any given day, absent technology, this will kill you in a matter of hours.
Indonesia (100+ million people) is a climate area that would experience this).
I myself have been camping in the Mojave for several days at a time with temperatures high above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Are you implying that the combination of heat and humidity is the deadly combination? If so, can you provide some evidence?
So the obvious solution is we just need to darken the sun a bit. </s>
We could solve the problem, sure, but it's a race against time while society is crumbling, in this scenario.
OTOH, the Manhattan Project occurred during a time of near-total war; so there's hope.
Widespread ecosystemic impacts can be profound, and difficult to model.
If you live in a temperate climate,
20c is quite pleasant and warm.
28c is getting into the range of a really hot day.
Because of how grand they are in scale, they don't seem to get much attention from the mainstream scientific community, but it seems feasible technologically (albeit expensive) to put forth major projects to reflect sunlight over deserts and capture significant amounts of carbon from power plants and oceans, amongst numerous other creative approaches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Proposed_s...
There was an article on HN recently about a new material that is excellent for cooling due to radiating energy primarily in the long-wavelength infrared spectrum. Just another option, just a matter of mass production and adoption.
But that's from memory, and I could be recalling the details wrong.
To me, this seems like a natural extension of our hydrological management projects, and of our reshaping of the biosphere to our liking. Take the continental US as an example - we have totally transformed the ecosystem from primeval forests and plains into this totally human-managed ecosystem of crop lands and domesticated animals. The next step is to think about the entire planetary biosphere, and apply large-scale engineering projects to directly modifying and managing it. Emissions control is a primitive way to do that, but it will eventually have to be more comprehensive and sophisticated. Eventually we need to sequester atmospheric carbon, but we also need to manage things like ocean acidity and the nitrogen cycle - all of these are critical factors in the set of geo/biophysical systems that create planetary conditions favorable for human civilization.
The trick is to develop and deploy these methods fast enough that we can race ahead of climate conditions that become too unfavorable to support a civilization that is capable of deploying them. I think people underestimate how much can be accomplished on that front in a very short amount of time, but that still doesn't excuse the complacency about it. In particular, I'm frustrated by the lack of urgency when it comes to preserving what remains of the "natural world" - at this point, I'm basically writing off a lot of the natural diversity that exists currently, and expect that the current mass extinction event will be the most severe in planetary history. Even if human civilization survives, it will exist in a mostly artificial biosphere with a tremendously streamlined set of species.
We're only really acidifying the very top layer, unfortunately that's where a huge fraction of the stuff that matters is.
Artificial upwelling is a somewhat promising geo-engineering tech to reduce acidification and increase primary production (and thereby carbon capture). The idea is to somehow bring deep sea water up to the surface. Early attempts used long tubes with one way valves that were lifted up and down by wave energy. New more promising techniques use wave energy to compress air, pump the air down deep and then bubble it (and the surrounding water) up from a grid of pipes.
This is the only proposal I've seen regarding ocean acidification.
In brief, we need massive amounts of lime to dump into the ocean as an artificial carbon cycle. The problem is how to get lime? If we have massive amounts of clean power, something similar to the cement process (CaCO3 -> CaO) is possible because limestone is cheap.
The problem is the energy requirements are insane. One of the estimations in the talk that remediates only 10% of our yearly CO2 emissions requires 700 TWh (2.52E18 J). Unless we start building \several hundred new GW-scale nuclear[1] power plants (and started a decade ago), I doubt we will be able to do much to address ocean acidification.
[1] I know solar has improved a lot recently. Unless it's possible to generate >1TW of continuous power (24x7), nuclear is probably the only option.
> Geo-engineering projects could not
> come too soon
"Ulcers aren't caused by stress, they are caused by bacteria!"
"Heresy!! String him up!!!"
If you've got compelling historical sources for holocaust denial or compelling scientific evidence against climate change, let's see it.
Oh please. No one would even try in this political climate. As you said "don't believe in climate change? you are a nazi".
> No one would even try in
> this political climate
Before your automatic downvote, I'm not denying climate change and some of its future effects (maybe even catastrophic). But the fact that it's happening doesn't explain or justify why people seem so eager to see its effects in everything even without a scientific proof whatsoever.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climat...
I'm ready for another two terms; from the outside looking in I expected continuance of the bombs dropping, the climate talks to continue to end in toothless agreements, the off-shoring of abysmal labour conditions to continue unabated, and so forth, regardless of whether your executive wore red or blue.
Please give me reason for hope, because we need it.
The problem isn't trying to socialize them.
Their beliefs are a matter of faith and as such is not something they are willing to seriously question without help. You simply cannot "socialize" this problem away. The reality is, these are people who genuinely caught up in a web of charismatic con artists and unfortunately we reality is we will not be more effective than professionals. I have friends who I interact with daily who support Trump and socializing with them it has become clear they take dogma over facts. And I don't mean things that are heavily politicized like Climate Change. I mean, literally, year old events that have dozens of news articles (including multiple right-wing sources) they choose to disbelieve over their chosen charismatic leader on YouTube and Right Wing Radio.
This isn't something you can fix with socialization. This is a willing blindness of cult followers who have been decieved.
https://cultnews.com/2015/01/how-do-you-deprogram-a-scientol...
> Deprogramming a current member of Scientology would depend upon the concern and support of family and friends.
> a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose their power;
> a process [Lifton calls] coercive persuasion or thought reform;
> economic exploitation of group members by the leader and the ruling coterie.
1) They felt vulnerable and they were losing ground in what they believe is a religious war on "their" belief system by Cultural Marxists / PC / Liberal culture. They feel that old institutions that they value have been weakened or destroyed outright. (i.e. Marriage) They rely on charismatic leaders to focus their worship. (i.e. Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Milo)
2) The "cult" has created a filter bubble in which cult members discuss things among themselves and assume all outside influences are heretics acting in bad faith to lure them away from the light. (i.e. They attack credentialed experts while holding up small minority opinions that are not the views of almost all experts in that field of study) People who act against this are ostracized by the party, called cucks, RINOs, etc. (i.e. Right wing talk radio, Alex Jones, Blogspam, Fox News Opinion Shows)
3) The "cult" acts against the economic best interests of the majority of its members and instead focus on servicing the needs of its ruling coterie of donors. (i.e. It focuses on servicing the needs of the wealthy donors and their beliefs.)
Socializing and normalizing people who claim people never shot BLM protesters, Mosques don't get burned down, and Sandy Hook never happened is the opposite of what you should do.
I'm sorry, but normalizing that behavior is not a viable solution.
If the numbers were different we could marginalize these people. But the numbers aren't different and it doesn't help that generally speaking liberals tend not to vote in off elections. So the problem is even worse. Marginalizing will blow back.
That makes it clear you don't understand the problem.
This isn't about scientific consensus (which they can deploy reasonable sounding experts to "debunk") but literal fact denial of events (such as shootings and arrest records) that happened in the previous 1-5 years.
Once a group of people start arguing that events that occurred a few months or a year ago simply _did not happen_ because it is wrongthink it is no longer a political animal but a cult. It is at that point you can't "socialize" those people and you need to seek alternatives.
Please explain to me why people are denying Sandy Hook was a real event?
They also deny things like this happen:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/11/the-3-a...
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/760250/Texas-mosque-burn...
Despite the fact I can link them to articles.
Please explain to me how that isn't cult thinking and fundamental denial of reality?
This isn't some lunatic fringe at this point but includes people the President of the United States either takes advice from or treats as friends (i.e. Alex Jones).
Further, unless you're a climate-change scientist, holding anything other than the 97% consensus view among climate-change scientists is willful ignorance, usually along partisan lines.
It is obvious to see - marathon runners, sprinters, etc
If you provide them with solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, tidal, or possibly fusion power at costs lower than or equal to organic fuels, they will not suffer (and might benefit).
The Saudis can go a hell of a lot cheaper for oil.
Unless you're willing to kill people we are going to have a mess to clean up in the future.
Which is ok, because in the future tech will be way more advanced.
I fear humanity may be in a race condition between our ability to engineer solutions and the problems that come with scaling our population.
That's a big if. The global climate is an extremely chaotic and complex system; ur ability to accurately model it is still extremely nascent. (Scientifically, understanding the global climate seems at least as hard as deciphering the architecture of the human genome, say.) If you are at all skeptical of our ability to master geoengineering in time for it to matter -- I'm talking a few decades here -- then it behooves you to opt for conservation instead. Literally the only system that we know for a fact is sustainable is the one that existed before industrialization.
Ideally, we need a climate change solution that can be enacted in a decentralised fashion by large numbers of motivated people without much need for government intervention.
You've more or less just described global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. If and when those efforts fail, Geo-engineering might turn out to provide a cheaper and more effective partial solution.
The craters in Siberia:
- http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170223-in-siberia-there-is-...
- https://www.google.com/maps/place/Batagaika+Crater/@67.58752...
I haven't read that concern recently, so I'm hopeful that scientists no longer feel that way, but it is alarming to see this day has come.
Right now, at 6PM EST, its 64F. It hasn't been below 20 in a week. Our average high is about 28F. We've had fewer snow events in the last 5 years than we had in any year in the 90s.
The climate has already changed.
And yes, even without positive feedback, it would take several decades for forcing to relax after carbon emissions ceased. Which is very unlikely.
So I really do think that it's time to consider active mitigation. But I'm not even very optimistic about that, given the likely positive feedbacks. Requisite mitigation requirements would also be going exponential. And where will the energy for that come from?
Which I'm just saying that it is difficult to take a season of weather and be sure it fits into a broader context. I'm arguing against drawing conclusions from short periods of observation.
I just dug through the literature to get this right. The only study I found that actually modelled the feedback of the rising temperature due to emitted greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4 - methane) on the permafrost says that any model they ran with a climate sensitivity above 3°C (how the system reacts to a doubling of CO2 or equivalent in the atmosphere [1]) produced a runaway effect, that is, atmospheric CO2 content keeps rising even if anthropogenic emissions stop in 2013 (which, as you know, they didn't). The current state on climate sensitivity is 3°C +-1.5°C.
They estimated some parameters conservatively too. So it could be worse. Or better - there are still a lot of uncertainties.
- The way carbon is released into the atmosphere can happen in different ways, and that can lead to different ratios of carbon in the air and other reservoirs like water or soil in bound form, as well as different ratios of methane and CO2 (they have vastly different atmospheric lifetimes and warming potential, so this matters).
- The total amount of carbon stored in permafrost soils is unclear. Permafrost can be very thick and deep, and large areas are hard to access. edit: Estimations are that the reservoir holds about twice that of the current atmosphere. Some of that will definitely go into the ocean and biosphere, but it's still a lot.
- Permafrost has a range of interesting behaviour during the freeze-thaw cycle (if you're interested, check it out, the features it produces are really neat). It is unclear how they change with temperature differences, and it influences the melting and release of carbon.
- Other climate-related effects such as flooding, increased vegetation etc have an influence. How much? Hard to say.
- Once the permafrost starts melting, carbon is released with a time delay, which is also not clear.
.. and so on. Non-linear effects, effects highly dependent on topography, micro-climate, vegetation... very hard to model in a consistent way. So.. it might be wrong too. Let's hope so.
The new balanced state will need years to centuries to be reached too, since thawing takes time. There is permafrost beneath the northern oceans. How? It's still there from the last ice age.
A note on time: The numbers I found for increased temperature due to permafrost melting by 2100 are in the 0.1°C-0.7°C range [2]. So we're probably fine. The ones after us.. well. There are some other feedback mechanisms that still require research. It would be great if something there helped us.. or we are all horribly wrong. That would be brilliant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity
[2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/8/0850...
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n10/full/ngeo1573.html
This one is behind a paywall. :(
runaway CO2 + everyone else's CO2 + our CO2
Speaking for myself, I live in a country in which my current elected leader claims that CO2-related climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese and who plans (essentially politically unopposed, at least for the next 2-4 years) to undo what little protection prior administrations have put into place to try to help.
This does not give me a feeling of having any control whatsoever over the situation, but I'd love to hear what you think the realistic options are.
I initially wrote "I" instead of "we", and I should have stuck with that formulation. I have control over my own emissions. Climate change isn't a binary thing. The more CO2, the more people will (possibly) die. My choices still have an impact on the outcome, on top of whatever runaway effect there is (or isn't).
Elon has stated in all seriousness that he personally puts global warming at above a 1% chance of being a species-threatening event for us, and that we need to become a multi-planetary species to reduce the odds of extinction.
He doesn't think that wiping out our species is a likely or even very probable. Just high enough that there is no better way that he can spend his time than trying to address and mitigate the problem.
The biggest issue we have with climate change is that we and the biosphere are set up for it to be this way, and adaption is slow. We might have to move many cities and the agriculture, and somehow manage with a biosphere that takes many generations to adapt.
All such possibilities are low. But they aren't 0. Elon's personal judgement is that combined they exceed 1%.
You know the Netherlands will be literally underwater within this century, don't you?
On the positive side, they have 500 years of experience building dykes and defending their coast line. Their experience will be invaluable to fight off raise of sea level during the current century, inland and around the world.
On the negative, they have huge liabilities that can be triggered even by temporary floods. Refugee crisises during storms, lost of high value agricultural land due to increased salinity of soil, etc. All this will cut down on their budget to support their current dyke infrastructure, precisely at a time when they should be extending and enhancing it agressively.
Rinse and repeat for 50 years, and you are bonded to see an ever growing number of marginal areas that are deemed not worth salvaging and left to be turned in unproductive swamps. I do not see the impoverished and overpopulated remanant of Netherlands surviving for long afterwards.
Best case scenario I imagine is they will be absorbed by Germany, who may at that time have the economic power to keep the dykes in running order. Or they may try to stick to their own guns, in which case it is hard to tell how much land they will be able to hold dry.
Since the disastrous 1953 flood, they've installed humongous valves at the mouths of all estuaries (Delta Works). If sea level increases more than a meter or so, they'll need to modify it.
Carbon chains, or in the simplest case, methane, are expensive to produce, as one might expect. By far it's better to never have burned that fossil fuel than to try to reclaim it from the atmosphere or ocean. Setting a $80/ton CO2 carbon tax (Exxon's internal estimate for new project planning) or even a $40/ton CO2 carbon tax (Shell's internal estimate for new project planning) is an obvious step. When even the fossil fuel companies are using this tax level in their internal estimates, it's just stupid that our government and political leaders aren't pushing for that or double or triple it.
My personal hope is that by 2040 we will have lots of excess electricity from solar and wind because we overprovision them. And we'll overprovision them because they will be the cheapest electricity, and we need enough of them such that at their low point of output they still meet our needs. In that case it seems that we may have cheap intermittent electricity. At that point we can start making hydrogen, then combining it with CO2, to start getting rid of greenhouse gases.
Some people think that we'll be able to take methane (natural gas) and make hydrogen and precipitate out the carbon as graphite. that's probably the easiest form of carbon to dispose of, whereas a liquid like methanol or even diesel is going to pose lots of problems.
It seems that CO2 in the oceans is going to be a bit more easy to remove than atmospheric CO2. So it seems that there are all sorts of chemistries that would be useful for that.
But still, we need a carbon tax to fund such carbon sequestration activities. Without a market mechanism, there's not going to be much investment. We need to both do research, then develop them into large industries really quickly.
Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax. Don't vote for anybody or any party that doesn't advocate for it. This is the biggest single issue for our children and their economy.
What I want to know is there any concrete plan to build something that will remove excess CO2 from the air and ocean that can be built by the government. Build this is going to go over a whole lot better than tax this.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shell-oil-warn-foss...
Of course, they are heavier into natural gas than their fossil fuel competitors, so a carbon tax impacts them the least, therefore giving them a competitive advantage.
The only reason it's not politically viable is because a minority of Americans have forced one political party to say so. That can change quickly. They think that they're protecting "their side" but even "their side" disagrees with them.
There's no excuse, absolutely no excuse, to be against a carbon tax. It's the most libertarian, market friendly way to deal with carbon emissions.
CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCaO3 + SiO2
The thermodynamics are much more favorable than "combustion-in-reverse" (trying to reform hydrocarbons from CO2). The products are stable and the process can deal with point CO2 sources, distributed sources, atmospheric CO2, and ocean acidification -- the whole shebang.
But the natural kinetics of silicate weathering are very slow. Kinetics can be improved by orders of magnitude if you grind the silicate minerals to dust; it's a surface area limited reaction. Kinetics get better yet if you apply the mafic rock dust to e.g. acid sulfate soils used for agriculture in the tropics. Those soils already need a pH boost to avoid crop stunting by soluble aluminum. Doing the adjustment with silicates instead of limestone means a two-for-one benefit (crop productivity plus drawing down CO2). But I think that to see widespread adoption there will have to be some targeted donor aid to poorer countries; ground limestone is cheaper than ground silicates if you don't care about CO2 abatement, and the rich world's farmers don't have a lot of acid sulfate soils in need of treatment within their home countries.
0) Donor government identifies a country where acid soils are already cultivated for agriculture. The recipient country should also be reasonably stable so you don't have to plan around armed conflict. Palm oil production in Malaysia looks like a good candidate. It's important to get buy-in from the (potential) recipient country's government too.
1) Within the chosen country, identify a region that has a lot of acid soil cultivation and that has easily accessible deposits of ultramafic rocks nearby. (Shouldn't be too hard, as such rocks are very common.)
2) Provide electrically powered crushers and/or grinders for size reduction, plus power sources if remote from the grid (ideally solar, maybe diesel generators as are common for mining sites; even if it's fossil powered the net CO2 is deeply negative). There may be some necessary R&D optimizing said crushers for low-maintenance conditions, since ultramafic rocks are among the hardest and toughest.
3) Pay locals to run the crushers and transport discounted-or-free rock dust to farmers in place of limestone. There might be some gaming of the system if e.g. drivers are really just dumping rock dust on the nearest empty land instead of finding farmers to take it, but that's tolerable. The project is already 75% done if you just get the rock crushed to dust in the first place. So key metric is ensuring that the crushers are still operable and are actually being used to crush rocks as intended.
Another idea, after I've written this out: there is less but still some acid soil under cultivation in the richer nations of the world, e.g. parts of Australia. Might want to try it first in the developed world where monitoring, language barriers, and infrastructure are all less challenging.
EDIT: a somewhat less effective but still potentially interesting idea is to put the ground rock in near-shore ocean environments where wave action will help abrade/weather the particles. Probably not as good as acidic warm soil in the tropics, but still a speedup over the natural way.
Having said that, it is IMHO possibly the worse place to be in case of a massive increase in the sea level. My house in Den Haag is 10ft below the sea level, maybe 5 miles away from the sea.
That's scary no matter how you put it, despite the best engineering effort from my friends at Rijkswaterstaat.
In contrast, Bangladesh's land area is ~150,000 km2 vs ~30,000 km2 for the Netherlands (figures off the top of my head.) Bangladesh's population is concentrated in places with extraordinarily bad water infrastructure and in the parts of the country most at risk for flooding. Their population is literally ten times larger... and despite having a 'low' growth rate it is growing at about two million additional people PER YEAR. Bangladesh's total GDP is also less than a quarter of a trillion dollars. To add to that, the Bangladeshi government is undoubtedly less skilled at leading massive public works and infrastructure projects to save 160,000,000 people (most of which live in poverty) from having their home flooded.
Put it this way, you have two choices. Choice A: you live in one of the wealthiest countries on earth, world renowned for its water management, and you're packed next to a lot of other wealthy people in a union with a lot of other wealthy countries. Your government says it will spend thirty thousand dollars per year - for every man, woman, child, baby, grandmother, you name it - to save your ass from global warming, and they have a history of winning against the water. Even if your country completely ceases to exist, you are bordered by two very wealthy countries where all your citizens have permission to live and work permanently, with no visas or administrative mess. These countries are big enough, and have faced enough of a population decline, that they'd each survive taking in 8 million or so highly educated, wealthy, English-speaking people with extremely similar culture and beliefs. Hell, we're so closely integrated with Belgium that we just peacefully swapped land! [0]
Or, you live in one of the poorest countries on earth, which has semi-friendly relations with a few other countries scattered around the globe. Your government says it will spend $400 - less than the price of a new smartphone - to try to save you from having your home wiped out by rising sea levels. This government's history of water management reads like a bad joke: their latest lauded efforts are to try to get water from a hundred and sixty kilometers away, and forty percent of the capital's population live in slums that regularly flood with sewage. The neighboring countries are all dealing with population problems of their own: they're also wealthier, and at least somewhat hesitant to take in one hundred and sixty million impoverished people.
I know personally I'm a hell of a lot more scared for Bangladesh.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/world/europe/belgium-neth...
Additionally, the rest of the displaced millions are mostly very highly educated, wealthy, English-speaking people who are allowed to live and work anywhere in the EU. Compare this to Bangladesh.
My impression is that this is the latest fallback position intended to stop/delay us from acting (I don't know that the parent commenter intends it that way; this isn't a criticism of them). In rough order:
1) There is no global warming
2) There is global warming, but it's not caused by humans
3) It's caused by humans but there is nothing we can do about it.
4) We can do something about it, but it's too expensive to be worthwhile.
5) It's cost-effective (because the cost of doing nothing is so high), but it's too late to act.
6) ? Any predictions for the next fallback argument?
The mouse wheel of denial.
That sounds like a cheap shot but the sad reality is that there are quite a few people who seriously believe that this is part of the rapture/apocalypse/tribulation revealed in Bible prophecy and that attempts to prevent or even mitigate against it are satanic.
Of course that's completely bonkers but we have to remember that there's a significant contingent invested in the idea that the bible is literally true and the realities of modern life are essentially illusions designed to test people's faith. I don't know exactly how many people believe this, but I'd bet on about 5-15 million people in the USA.
Secondly, Jesus was quite emphatic that no one would know the day & time of his return. He did say there would be warning signs, but also said it would still be a surprise. If someone wants to destroy the world in order to push for the Second Coming, then they're on the verge of being a false prophet as described by Christ. Not to mention: why take the risk when this might not be the time of his return?
I'm personally not a believer now, but I was raised in a very conservative Christian family. These arguments sometimes have an effect on my friends and family still in the church.
People who believe such things generally justify them by that very stewardship clause. According to that take, God gave the planet to humans, so however they use it is fine and accounted for. So either AGW simply isn't real, or if it is, God will take care of it.
7) You gave the power, but to the wrong people.
8) The people in power are going to survive but we aren't.
I worry about climate change and so do most of my friends but I see ZERO action on any of our parts. Example: Nearly all my friends FLEW to GDC this week, many of them that's a HUGE amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere just so we can have fun, network and party. Then we go to BBQ and hamburger restaurants and eat lots of beef which we're told we shouldn't because it's the biggest resource user for the smallest amount of food. Many of them upgrade their $!000 phone every year as well as several other electronic gadgets creating lots of electronic waste.
My point is, even the majority of "believers" won't change their behavior. At most if you're lucky they might start carrying their own bag to the grocery store yet still probably have 15+ pairs of shoes for "fashion" (yet another industry people claim is bad for the environment"
If the believers won't change their behavior what chance is there the non-believers will do anything?
If the only solution is "vote for a world government to geo-engineer the planet" well that's never going to happen.
Is the only rational thing to do, figure out where the new beachfronts will be and start buying property while it's cheap (like Lex Luthor from the first Superman movie)
I did stop eating beef but my tech company cafeteria seems to be huge fans of it and will not stop giving it to us.
If we paid the true cost of carbon, probably we'd fly less, fuel would be re-engineered, and other forms of transport would be developed and expanded.
It's your decision to keep ignoring the problem. Nobody else taking action does not absolve you from your responsibility.
As a bonus, scaling down your consumption means your money goes much further. Early retirement (think thirties), is not impossible. If you're interested in these ideas, I've enjoyed reading [1].
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it.
It would be a damn sight better to be living in Switzerland, NL will be sea again once that kicks off.
Not much to do against that kind of rise in water levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback
'runaway' is hard to predict, perhaps even hard to define, but we're getting a much better handle on climate change feedback mechanisms.
As others have said, this only became more proven. Even with a non-linearity at out-of-observation CO2 levels that causes temperatures to drop the resulting weather patterns will be... unpleasant.
I doubt that there's anything we humans can do at this point other than preserve and restore the Amazon, stop polluting as much as possible, and pray.
Earth by David Brin is a very good novel that describes a grim future some 40 years hence. It goes off into pure sci-fi regarding black holes bouncing around the earth's core, but the predictions in the novel seem pretty realistic. He speculates that as the Northern Territories and the Siberian tundra thaw, people will move north and build towns to get away from the increasingly tropical conditions in previously moderate latitudes.
Something not touched upon in that novel but which we are seeing today is the spread of tropical diseases like zika into new areas. This is one of the scariest prospects, actually; the next great plague will probably come from a previously unknown tropical virus or bacterium.
I hope the Mars colonization project proceeds apace.
And terraforming Mars would be several orders of magnitude more expensive than even a massive readjustment of Earth's climate.
I'm imagining a turn-key colony that initially accommodates 1,000 people and can expand arbitrarily, that is robotically prepared, then the humans arrive to a heated, lighted, oxygenated, self-sufficient habitat. Once this has been standardized, it's a matter of dropping these in various spots around the planet, not too far apart, humanity can then colonize the planet in 1,000 person increments.
It's not a solution for our climate problems back on Earth, obviously, but it's a way to ensure some redundancy, should the Earth become uninhabitable through climate catastrophe or war. Or an asteroid strike.
Where are the numbers? How much of a contribution is this likely to have on atmospheric CO2 levels? All this says is "bad news everyone", but doesn't quantify it.
The article breathlessly pretends this isn't the case.
Can someone suggest a few environmental charities that can be donated to?
https://foodtechconnect.com/2014/01/17/infographic-of-the-we...
And if you have the financial means to take the risk to be picky about your job (and are technically inclined), have a read of Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change?" post, so much to be done assuming it's not all too late already.
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
Most charities are about damage control, not dealing with the problem.
Another option, is invest in a Solar Share program if they are available in your country. Possibility for good returns and helps build more solar energy.
Hey, hey! Why the downvote? I thought it was funny: your mailbox underwater, you swimming out to get the check....
[sigh]Oh, well, no fun here...
I really should get some land high above sea level while it's still cheap and undesirable.
You and I will foot their bill because they have more representation than we do.