We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I've come to think that climate change will be humanity's defining moment, and that we'll all be suffering greatly come mid-to-late-century. I want to do what I can to put my professional skills to use in helping. But I'm not sure where to even begin.
Most of the work in none-industrialised countries have really poor data tracking systems, so that is where we thought we could make the biggest impact. But some of our tools are even starting to see traction in Europe.
There is plenty to do in this field. Unfortunately there is an uphill struggle even educating people that they need to use data to drive decisions, but it is happening. Happy to answer questions.
That means that to seriously get things done soon is going to require government action, and that means politics.
Regardless of whether you lean to the left or the right, register as a Republican and participate in the Republican primaries or caucuses for your local, state, and national offices supporting those Republicans who acknowledge that climate change is a series problem and that the government needs to play an active role in slowing, stopping, or reversing it.
I say register as a Republican, even if you would normally be something more to the left, because right now the Democrats are much more likely to nominate candidates that acknowledge climate change and the need for strong government action. The Republicans do have some people who believe that, but they currently rarely get nominated.
What we need to see is general elections where it is both the Democrat and the Republican that are on the right side of climate change so that no matter which party wins the election we get a government that will do something about the problem.
[1] Generally what most places will see is that bad things that already happen there will very slowly happen a little more often, and get a little more bad. But in many places there will also be good things that start happening a little more often and get a little bit better. It will take a generation or two before these changes have become big enough and frequent enough in most places that it will really be noticeable to the people there that yup, their climate has changed.
If you want to focus reducing impact then for CO2 there are many sources for it in developing nations. The US EPA (quick, archive it before it goes away!) lists these for the US[1]; Electricity (35%), Transportation (32%), Industry (15%), Residential & Commercial (10%), and others at 7%. Any endeavor which is cutting into transportation or electricity generation specifically will be most impactful but there are places like better LED lighting for business (reduce commercial electricity consumption). Pretty well plowed but they can always use the help.
To act on reducing the existing gas levels perhaps the best place will be sequestration exercises. Generally it helps to have a Chemistry background here because many of the sequestration techniques consist of converting CO2 vapor into something that holds on to the Carbon. There are more mechanical solutions (pumping gas into mines) and there are biological solutions (growing plants rapidly and then burying them) as well. From a software perspective I would imagine the biggest use would be control systems software as these are essentially industrial processes that folks are trying to automate.
Finally if you're looking at living with it, then there things like modelling immersion maps for the coastal areas and helping cities plan to migrate to higher land. There are efforts to design more weather tolerant living structures to survive larger and more sustained weather events, and storage and recycling systems to maximize the use of local resources which may become scarce in a different climate.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases#c...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/using-smart-satellites-to-moni...
http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf
The idea is you crush and spread silicate rock dust, it produces cations and goes into the ocean, and then reacts with and absorbs carbon from the atmosphere to produce a carbonate mineral that fertilizes ocean life and de-acidifies the oceans.
Requires crushing hundreds of cubic km of rock per year, and spreading the product in damp jungle climates and coastlines.
I was curious about climate change. To start I cut out all the noise. I looked for things I could see, touch, and plug into. Put those tech skills to work! There are plenty of opportunities, where you have the most value is bringing your expertise to bear. Email me: tito@impossiblelabs.io
If you find this topic interesting, join the Google group Climate Change 2.0: A Call to Adventure https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/climat...
This is just a list of (mostly) ill-informed questions rather than "Thought-Provoking Climate Change 2.0 Ideas", and certainly don't answer acabal's question, or the address title of the post.
I think that in reality we will not see people changing behaviors unless and until there are real observable climate changes that are affecting their lives. And even then I have my doubts.
There's no reason we can't address climate change and have $5 cups of coffee at Starbucks (although I prefer $2 cups of coffee at Dunkin Donuts).
But yeah, you're right, highlighting the Starbucks is a bad plan here.
Highlighting all the ways in which being good for the environment is good for business is definitely a plus.
Given the external costs, big users are being subsidised by everyone else.
Good luck with that.
However, our contemporary Republican part uses "anti-regulations" as code for "anti-government, anti-law enforcement", so I doubt carbon tax will get any play.
You may find that high impact solutions are in areas you may not be thinking about but that energize you, like the fact that educating girls beats out rooftop solar power (which is also a very high ranking solution).
Do you happen to know what this kind of work is called? I'd like to find more from other fields and distribute them at my local college.
Of course political activism is available, but the question then is where to push on that front. Enough people are working on awareness, probably not enough are working on amending the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity and London's Convention on Dumping of Wastes at Sea to allow and encourage geoengineering on an international scale in the first place. Something as simple as dumping lots of iron in the ocean ("iron fertilization") could be all we need to do in the short term, but there's a lot of resistance to it. If I were interested in this path I'd focus on removing that resistance politically and/or scientifically.
I'm in it right now. The best thing to do right now is to exert as much political pressure, because half the workplaces you're thinking of joining are in the current administration's crosshairs.
It's easy.
- Stop flying.
- Eat less meat.
- Buy less stuff.
- Use less energy.
Living "virtuously" only changes your own impact. We need to change impact globally.
We need to make jets that run on biofuels or synthetic fuels. We need to change our energy systems to be carbon neutral. We need to help the developing start using carbon neutral technologies directly, without going through a fossil fuel phase.
These are the things that will stop climate change. Changing one's own impact does very little.
That's an issue of sustainability, not climate change. Those subjects are related but not interchangeable. I don't have the latest data, but I do recall various biofuels having a greater carbon impact than various fossil fuels a few years ago. If the situation has changed, great. But we need to remember that sustainable resources and climate friendly resources are not necessarily the same thing.
What works is "force others to change".
We're not going to solve global warming without forcing everyone to change. It's not a personal problem, and in fact, you can have small-scale cases of large carbon footprint.
It's not a problem if Leonardo DiCaprio is flying a private jet. It's only a problem if a lot of people are flying private jets.
In the case of climate change, austerity living may actually be counterproductive towards convincing others.
The change we need in the world is both technology and attitude.
Using 160kwh/month from PG&E for my 600sqft apartment, driving 12 miles/weekday on a mix of compact hatchback and small-displacement motorcycle, and flying round-trip across the country roughly once a year, I apparently have a carbon footprint of 1.59 metric tons.
That's less than 8% the US average, and below the long-term worldwide target of 2 metric tons.
That single trip home for Christmas has more carbon impact (0.63 metric tons) than an entire year of motorcycle commuting (0.49 metric tons)!
I'm also making no deliberate sacrifices or trying at all to live a low-carbon-emissions lifestyle, it just kind of happens by default when you're living in the Bay Area (small dwellings, low HVAC requirements, short drives because the freeway is even worse than public transit for long distances, etc). So... put "live in or near a big city" on that list?
[0] http://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=8
The article itself is quite clear about this: e.g., it quotes one climate scientist as saying "These milestones are just numbers, but they give us an opportunity to pause and take stock and act as useful yard sticks for comparisons to the geological record." I suspect it's the usual story: journalist writes reasonable article, sub-editor puts needlessly overexcited headline on it.
You can't appeal to everyone.
There's not a lot of things that I could personally do, and that really bums me out. While my life choices already contributed to at least one person not polluting the planet a lot (as an example, I don't drive a car and I don't use gas for heating), I don't see much more I can do about it.
I know I get my electricity from a coal plant, and I can't really save on electricity more than I am now. Recycling is something I'm doing as thoroughly as I can, but it's a bitch in a city where there are only two locations where I can dispose a recyclable waste.
I can't really do much more, and I'm not even reducing the waste at all. I'm just living my life avoiding to pollute the earth even more.
> On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
--Stephen Schneider in APS News, Aug/Sep 1996, p. 5 [0]
Note especially: "So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
He necessarily implies that one must be dishonest in order to be "effective." This raises the question: effective at what? The answer is obvious: effecting their policy goals.
This raises other questions: If a policy goal requires dishonesty to garner public support, is it a worthy goal? Is it backed by sound reasoning and evidence?
Most importantly, why should the public trust such sweeping policy to a few people who have decided that they know better than everyone else, and are therefore entitled to lie to the uneducated masses, for their own good? Is that not authoritarian? Does not madness lie down this path, or are climate scientists immune to lapses in judgment and ethics and morals?
0: http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96....
It won't cost all that much. Not doing it will cost a whole heck of a lot more.
It's possible that it would change 3% year-over-year productivity growth to 0.5%. That "it" might be the difference between a marginally healthy economy and "lost generations" and political upheaval.
The "give us the flight controls now or regret it for eternity" position is not necessarily wrong, but there's a real lack of credible evidence with useful confidence intervals that any given combination of approaches will have net desirable outcomes. And there's a justified (I think) lack of trust in that approach.
The entire situation is dire, so why don't we see more of a "full court press" on responding to the effects of climate change as well? Investments into dikes and levees, building above sea level more aggressively, more aggressive weatherproofing, relocating populations from increasingly arid to increasingly temperate places, etc.?
People worldwide are clearly more and more cynical about centralized seats of power (Washington, Brussels, Davos, etc.), so why are we saying the solution to all this is more special interests (say, 'yes' to American batteries, 'no' to French nuclear tech), more regulation, and more bureaucracy?
Alternative plan:
If the problem is carbon in the air, just implement and gradually ramp up a (progressive) tax on that, provide a phased-in minimum income to offset general cost-of-living increases, and then just play with those knobs until emissions hit desirable levels.
Just imposing it on the developed world would help some, but any benefit would be at least partially offset by emissions-heavy industry shifting further to the developing (and higher emissions-intensive) nations.
Worse, people are calling people with concerns about subsidizing, say, certain battery companies (at the expense of alternative approaches and competing battery companies) as "global warming skeptics" and "anti-science". As if subsidizing particular avenues of R&D is a scientifically objective question.
You aren't a starving peasant in Bangladesh, dude.
Reducing energy consumption to any significant degree will doom millions of people to an unpleasant death.
And no, solar and wind won't do it. At least not earth-based solar. Space-based solar might do the trick, but the risks and costs would be extremely high.
There is exactly one feasible alternative to fossil fuels, and that is nuclear.
Choose your pick.
2. You don't get to advocate the end of fossil fuels by spreading disaster scenarios while ignoring the very real human costs that would result from what you are advocating.
2. If you want to talk about "real human costs" of climate policy, you might want to pick a country that is not built upon a coastal flood plain that is routinely flooded[1]: Bangladesh is going to be among the countries hit hardest by climate change[2].
It makes me suspect that you don't care about human costs at all. On the other hand it did help me writing this rebuttal, so I guess all is well after all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh
> In 1998, over 75% of the total area of the country was flooded, including half of the capital city Dhaka. ... 30 million people were made homeless and the death toll reached over a thousand.
[2] Same page
> The difference between historical and projected average temperatures each season throughout the world has revealed that harvests from major staple crops could drop by 40 percent by the end of the 21st century due to high temperatures in the growing seasons.
Well, I actually do care about people. So, there's that.
"In 1998, over 75% of the total area of the country was flooded, including half of the capital city Dhaka. ... 30 million people were made homeless and the death toll reached over a thousand."
That's sad, all right. How many routinely died in famines before the advent of modern, high-energy, mechanized agriculture?
Hint: a lot more than a thousand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
Try ten million. And that was just one such event. They were routine in the days before mechanized agriculture and mechanized food transport. Happened all the time. Note that the article tries to blame this on the British (and they do appear to have been rather callous), but the primary cause was the failure of the monsoon. Nowadays if a monsoon fails you can truck in food from somewhere else. You can't do that without fossil fuels or some equivalent. Not to any real degree.
"It makes me suspect that you don't care about human costs at all. "
I'm not the one who wants to sentence the bulk of the human race to a preindustrial scenario involving periodic mass starvation. So, no.
Until you actually demonstrate functional and economic alternatives, that is exactly what it means.
Yes. Climate change proponents post articles such as the OP here and then cry "The sky is falling, the sky is falling and I can prove it! We're at the 410 PPM Threshold, just as we predicted!"
Whether the down-voters like it or not, climate change is a very real and scientifically established fact, but what that will do to people on the world is not a scientific fact. It's just what currently most people predict will happen (and disagreeing with this is feels like some kind of thought crime in the traditional sense--it's not science). The world is not going to end. Biodiversity and Biomass is decreasing. The Northwest Passage is being opened up. Iron fertilization will become a more likely policy to sequester carbon and increase biomass in the oceans. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather patterns most likely will increase. Productive farm land may or may not increase. Russia actually may have a fair bit to gain from it. But the fact is, there is a lot we really don't know.
In the very long run our civilization will need to harvest as much energy from the sun as possible, but in the meantime we've done a pretty fantastic job of screwing up the planet, so it's a pretty good idea to stop emitting so much pollutants into our atmosphere, since we don't really know for sure, but we have a lot of reasons to think it won't be good. That's really the best argument to end climate change, but it's probably not convincing enough to change behavior in large numbers of people.
That said, the politics and bureaucracies around climate change have started to resemble the War on Poverty and War on Drugs--institutions which now exhibit bureaucratic intertia (have an inherent perverse incentive structure, and they rationally (evilly) place their own survival over that of solving the problems they're tasked with).
Guess what? The earth was just fine.
Humans will also be fine.
Or they could make things better.
"That's the interesting part of the problem, we don't have accurate models of all the side effects."
In fact, we do know that the CO2 level of the earth's atmosphere has been much higher in the past, and that this didn't produce anything like the "all life on earth dies" scenario that the doomsayers keep touting.
"Ecosystems are complicated and fragile."
The ecosystem survived the Chicxulub event, dude. It's not going to be knocked out by 410 ppm of CO2.
"Ecosystem" is not shorthand for "life exists on Earth somewhere." An ecosystem is a particular state of the dependencies between life forms.
The ecosystem that existed before the big asteroid strike was thoroughly and rapidly destroyed; a new ecosystem developed afterward. That's fine from a general "life finds a way" perspective, but it sucked for the sauropods, who went extinct.
EDIT: if you want a sense of why the indirect effects of anthropogenic climate change might be bad, look at the social unrest reacting to a couple million people migrating out of Syria. What do you think it's going to be like when about a billion people have to migrate inland due to sea level rise?
"What do you think it's going to be like when about a billion people have to migrate inland due to sea level rise?"
Considering that even the worst-case doom-crying scenarios issued by the IPCC predict a sea level increase of the order of 1 meter over the period of a century (i.e., ~1 cm per year), your (and Hollywood's) suggestion of rioting mobs fleeing the tsunami-like rising ocean is just not based in reality.
The fact that this is news to you is a clue that perhaps you know less about this subject than you think you do.
Hint: that means I won.
You claimed that the ecosystem "didn't survive" the Chicxulub event because there were different organisms afterward. I pointed out that by that "definition" the ecosystem has never "survived", because it has been in a state of constant change since day one.
Rather than responding to this, you just got nasty.
I repeat: I win. Sorry.
The question is, what do those changes mean for individual organisms? Because that's what you and I are.
Changes to the climate and ecosystem are like changes to velocity. Whether the change is good or bad for people depends on the magnitude and direction.
I do think that your focus on who is "winning" an imaginary Internet slap fight is detracting from your understanding.
So. Yes, the CO2 level has been much higher in the past. For instance, in the Cambrian period it was much higher than it is now. ... And, in the Cambrian, the surface temperature of the earth was about 7 degrees C higher than it is now.
As someone else remarked: no, "the ecosystem" did not survive the Chicxulub event. Life survived it, sure, but it wiped out the dinosaurs (other than the birds). That's kinda a big deal.
What we choose to do with that knowledge is anthropocentric because we are humans.
Science can tell us how fire works. We still have to decide what to do when our house catches on fire.
A problem with that argument is that the sun was about 20% dimmer back then. Hence it may get hotter this time around.
According to wikipedia[1], the Sun increases in brightness steadily about 1% every 100M years, yet we had CO2 levels 10 times higher than now about 500M years ago.
I know there are studies finding a difference in productivity between 600 and 1000 ppm with just hours of exposure, so isn't it possible that going from 300 globally to over 400 has had some health impact over a lifetime? Is there a point where lower CO2 has no effect and how do we know that?
The bigger problem is that in our quest for energy efficiency, we would further reduce ventilation, increasing the indoor CO2 concentration; but this can be countered with better ventilation (using a thermal exchange system so it is more energy efficient than opening a window). The reduction of indoor CO2 possible from this is probably greater in most places than the ~100ppm increase in background concentration.
I guess the only danger is reaching thermal runaway before that happens? Then again, earth CO2 levels have been far higher in the past without signs that it killed off much life on Earth. Is rising CO2 that dangerous?
Don't humans already have effective ways to reduce surface heating by injecting dust or chemicals into the upper atmosphere? We've seen that throwing a bunch of dust up there reflects more heat and it sounds like something certainly within our ability to do.
I'm not a climate change denier, I'm just skeptical that the rising CO2 level is as dangerous as it's made out to be.
Respectfully, is this a mindset you apply to other aspects of your life?
Let's say you leased an apartment in a large building, and after an inspection, numerous structural engineers said the building was in danger of collapse. Would you say "I don't know much about engineering, but I'm skeptical it's that bad", or would you demand the building management take steps to correct the issues?
I ask whats going to happen when the building gets hotter quickly and get 10 different answers. Somebody tells me the building has been much hotter in the past, but this is the fastest its heated up before. I ask if it's actually even bad that the building is getting hotter quickly and everyone says "Of course it is! It's never heated up this fast before!"
I sit back and wonder why I should worry about this building heating up if it's been much hotter in the past, or if it's even a bad thing. I also wonder why none of the engineers suggested opening the windows instead of producing less heat. It happens that the building is currently at a historically low temperature, and raising it could make the building more comfortable for many inhabitants anyways
We know that increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 will result in higher temperatures (the mechanism is well understood, and the IPCC models have done a good job of predicting that over the past couple decades), we also know rising temperatures will result in rising sea levels (again, we have empirically observed this happening at rates consistent with our understanding of the mechanism). From there it's just math to figure out how much coastal land will be inundated over the coming century (which is just one of many implications of climate change).
You are suggesting various ways in which that might not happen, with no evidence supporting them, from the perspective of someone who doesn't have much of an understanding of climate science. Do you think it is more likely that you have outsmarted 97% of climate scientists, or that the experts are more likely to know what they're talking about than you are?
Without those links, your last paragraph is really a statement about your own approach to the problem, with a little condescension thrown in for his failure to follow the same pattern. It's counterproductive to your own goal of persuasion.
In any scientific endeavor (not just climate change), when a skeptic takes the time to engage, the response should be data, not appeal to authority.
Put differently, environmental scientists have a credibility gap in some segments of the populace, and it isn't possible to fix any credibility gap through peer pressure. You can only offer evidence, tailored where possible to the listener's level of interest and sophistication.
That's not my understanding. We had a warming "pause" from 2000 to 2010 (approximately). That was certainly not predicted.
Then scientists went back to look for an explanation of the "pause". Ocean temperature data was then incoporated, other data adjusted and the "pause" was no more.
I would characterize the climate modelling as constantly evolving. We don't have it nailed yet.
Even more importantly, the net effects (sea level rise, etc) were well within the predicted range.
I think it's unrealistic to believe we can get the whole planet to reduce CO2 emission, so we should stop spending so much effort on it and find other solutions.
I also doubt how much rising sea level will actually hurt humanity. Even in the worst case scenario were talking about an inch or two a year. This is slow enough to easily build a wall, dredge to raise up land, or move buildings away from rising waters. Besides, who puts buildings five feet above the water? The vast majority of buildings would just flood more often. It's not like buildings on the coast don't already get hit by cyclones.
Why?
The problem with fossil fuels - especially coal, isn't "just CO2", it's all the ash that is killing people.
The problems with oil extraction isn't just the CO2 at the end, it's all the crude and junk stuff going (bunker oil), and the political power of the oil lobby, and how dictatorships are financed by these resources.
Sure, these are the factors that make it hard to change, even "locally", within the US.
> cyclones
Yes, and just estimate the cost of a lot more cyclones. It turns out to be a lot more than switching to non-fossil stuff. And that's why a lot of people think that it's not rational to try to continue the consumption of fossil fuels (in a way that leads to CO2 emissions).
No, that wasn't my claim. If I have a claim, it's that, instead of simply moving away, people keep building up an active seismic fault that's likely to suffer a catastrophic earthquake in the near future. Even high taxes (some of which funded the policy piece you cited) and massively increased costs of construction (such as proposed in the policy piece you cited) aren't incentive enough to stop.
This aspect of human behavior is worth remembering when someone suggests similar "incentives" to address climate change. It's trying to incentivize the same mindset that would rather build cities out of springs and pendulums than move to stable land.
We should face the reality that humans will eventually deal with the negative side of climate change using (not so?) metaphorical springs, levers, stilts, and who-knows-what, and it will be okay.
I don't click Forbes links, but from the URL it looks like it's about a hoax bill that was proposed for PR purposes. Not interested.
If a storm cuts off gas, electricity, water, internet, and paved road access to these people, and the government says "What's the problem? People have been living without them for most of history!", these same people would cry bloody murder (as anybody else would).
Someone asked him about climate change, and his reply was (quoting from memory, so forgive me if I get the wording slightly off): "As I understand it, in 11 billion years, the sun will expand and swallow the earth, making the issue of climate change moot."
Well, that's great because it's both true and absolutely nonsensical. And it's a great way to do absolutely nothing, policy-wise, for any problem. "What about police violence?" "As I understand it, in 11 billion years..." "What's your position on the student loan debt crisis?" "As I understand it, in 11 billion years..."
You're right, and this is a common problem when you're in a leadership role. The information is imperfect. If this weren't true we wouldn't need leaders, we'd be omniscient. Often, reasonable people could disagree about the best course of action. The trick is to have vision, judgement, and a willingness to take risks and decisive action with good transparency.
> I sit back and wonder why I should worry about this...
You're in good company. Most of our leadership has been taking the same strategy.
> I ask whats going to happen when the building gets hotter quickly and get 10 different answers.
It shouldn't be surprising that there isn't one clear answer. Earth is a complex system, and it is changing in many ways right now.
> I ask if it's actually even bad that the building is getting hotter quickly and everyone says "Of course it is! It's never heated up this fast before!"
The pace of global warming is indeed a problem, as organisms cannot migrate or adapt fast enough. Forest ecosystems, for example, may not be able to migrate to cooler latitudes or elevations. [1]
> I also wonder why none of the engineers suggested opening the windows instead of producing less heat.
Not an option. Except for the sunlight streaming in, our planet is a closed system. A spaceship[2] may be a better analogy.
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130915-clima... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth
Actually, it is an option. Either we can take CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back underground where it came from; or we could start doing climate engineering to increase the reflectivity of Earth (less sunlight in), using water vapor clouds at low altitude or aerosols at high altitude; or we could put up a big shade in space between us and the sun.
Are those expensive and difficult things? Definitely. But all of them are possible.
Maybe they aren't exact with their knowledge. Maybe even it'll be more out of control than even they are able to forecast.
What then?
While climate science is a constant exercise in refinement (as all science should be), it's not a bunch of wild-ass guesses.
I don't know of anyone who claims there is anything specifically meaningful about 400 vs 410pmm, it is simply a new record.
I like this analogy because it highlights the wrongheadedness of climate change denial. There is a key difference, however: to get the dangerous apartment building fixed involves a reasonable number of people and a reasonable amount of money, no matter how big or how unsound the building is.
Stopping -- let alone reversing -- climate change is orders of magnitude more difficult than that. It involves the coordination of billions of people in a task that goes against their short-term, individual interest. This is very hard to do [0].
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...
It is also extremely dangerous. Most folks engaging in the climate change debate are implicitly doing a cost-benefit analysis of action vs non-action (action implying governmental action). Non-action may involve rising temperatures and extreme weather. Or perhaps extreme whether has nothing to do with carbon emissions - consensus doesn't yet exist on that point. Or clean energy innovation like solar will become more cost effective and the problem will solve itself. Action on curbing emissions - e.g. carbon tax - could mitigate the problem. Or perhaps climate change inertia is too strong for anything less than complete ban of CO2 emissions to make any sort of dent. And instead something like a carbon tax could, for example, 1) slow down economies in developed nations, which means 2) lower purchasing power for people in those countries, leading to 3) fewer imports from developing countries, which further leads to 4) lower standard of living for folks in developing countries, including people starving to death.
So "climate change denial" is a strawman. Skepticism is not a monolith. These are complex issues.
AGW is multivariate. If temperature is rising, how much do we expect it to continue rising? If rising temperatures are due at least in part to CO2 emissions, then to what degree? How do we choose between the various complex climate models (indeed part of the reason we were so ill-prepared for Hurricane Katrina was that nobody considered the model that predicted the trajectory it ended up taking)? Are rising temperatures invariably bad? What if higher temperatures and CO2 increase forestation? Or maybe it increases biodiversity of harmful things, like diseases? Or maybe it decreases those things? Do CO2 emissions affect weather patterns? How so? Do we get more hurricanes? Do emissions affect water availability? How about acid rain? etc.
But let me try to answer them as best as I can.
> If temperature is rising, how much do we expect it to continue rising?
It will keep rising as long as we keep generating CO2.
> If rising temperatures are due at least in part to CO2 emissions, then to what degree?
Stop the "if", "at least", and "in part". Rising temperatures are due to man-made CO2, period. Other causes are rounding errors.
> How do we choose between the various complex climate models (indeed part of the reason we were so ill-prepared for Hurricane Katrina was that nobody considered the model that predicted the trajectory it ended up taking)?
You mean those that say the sea level would rise 50 cm, 1 m, and 2.5 m?
You don't have to know future trajectory of hurricanes in order to build a hotel in Miami. You just assume that a hurricane will hit it at some point in the future and plan for it.
> Are rising temperatures invariably bad?
Non sequitur. Of course it's not invariably bad. Some people made a fortune with the dot-com bubble, 2008 housing crisis, invasion on Iraq, you name it. The Earth has 7 billion people: basically no disaster will be invariably bad for all of them.
> What if higher temperatures and CO2 increase forestation?
...and?
> Or maybe it increases biodiversity of harmful things, like diseases?
Tropical diseases will most likely spread further, so yes.
> Or maybe it decreases those things?
I can't see how, but if that happens, well good. There must be at least a few positive effects of climate change. (E.g., the opening of the arctic shipping route.)
> Do CO2 emissions affect weather patterns?
Well sure.
> How so?
We're still figuring this out, I'm afraid.
> Do we get more hurricanes?
Probably.
> Do emissions affect water availability?
Yes. Google "receding glaciers".
> How about acid rain?
...how about acid rain what?
I'm surprised that you think "NK having or not having nuclear weapons" is a binary choice, after all. Does it have uranium or plutonium? How much? Is it reliable? Where can it be delivered? Would China back up NK or not? Is it invariably bad? What if it acts as a deterrent against regional war? Does it affect economy of North or South Korea? Does it affect the politics of South Korea? Will we get more military conflict or less? What about Japan?
Regulation is bad, taxation is theft, no government is good is all you're going to get from him.
If you can believe his words (doubtful), the current President of the US is one of these.
-- ISAAC ASIMOV
Why is it okay to be skeptical of what meteorologists are predicting, but not okay to be skeptical of what climate scientists are predicting?
It's one thing to be skeptical of sciences that have stood the test of time like civil engineering and quite another to be skeptical of climate science, whose models are being updated annually in response to the discovery of new variables.
Note: I am not saying we should be climate change deniers, only that we should not blindly accept apocalyptic predictions as the gospel truth of what is going to happen to the planet if we fail to mitigate CO2.
Because you can predict that a slot machine will be a net profit maker for a casino without being able to predict the result of the next pull of the lever.
Of course climate models are continually updated as technology and data improves (as are the models used in structural engineering). That is how science works. Historically, though, the mainstream (IPCC) models have actually performed quite well.
Precipitation forecasts are usually accurate several days out and temperature forecasts are good a week or two out, in my experience. If I want to know if it's going to rain on Saturday I check the weather on Thursday and it's usually right. When there's a big storm comin', a local meteorologist does rolling updates with the latest data and it usually gives a consistent but evolving picture that matches up with what actually happens.
Are people disappointed by this? What are you wanting out of your weathermen that you're not getting?
I know the weatherman used to be a joke, back before satellites and computers, but I swear the cliche only survives as part of climate change denialism.
The overwhelming consensus of experts is that its going to have an enormous impact. It's still worth studying when, how and where its effects will materialize first but that does not excuse inaction.
How soon? Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" predicted apocalyptic consequences in as few as 10 years. 10 years later and it turns out the documentary had tons of erroneous assumptions. Oops.
> That's akin to demanding that all engineers accurately predict which piece of the roof will collapse first, where the pieces will hit the floor, how many pieces it will break up into and on which date.
If your model has poor predictive power, it's not a complete model. Engineers can accurately predict lots of things using standard models - for example whether a building will be able to withstand shear wind forces. Climate science cannot predict anything except "it will be disastrous with apocalyptic proportions at some non-deterministic point in the future" How is that a useful prediction beyond generating hype?
In a couple of lifetimes, which is still too soon, as reversing the trend will likely take far more effort. For a graphic description of how far we're venturing out of what we're used to as a species, see https://xkcd.com/1732/
> If your model has poor predictive power, it's not a complete model - for example whether a building will be able to withstand shear wind forces.
To continue with the analogy, we know the building can't withstand shear wind forces. We just don't know exactly how and where the pieces will land.
In the meantime, other factors will contribute to our downfall much faster than climate change ever could such as increasing societal divisiveness over politics, decline in nuclear families as the basic societal unit, selfishness, and abandonment of religion.
What evidence are you basing that on?
A new problem is discovered (i.e. the earth can't sustain the current birth rate forever). The problem is hyped up[1] in an effort to find a solution (abortions -> Zero Population Growth[2]). Many in the science community buy into the hype, crunch numbers, and make dire predictions. Public policies in the 70s change in response to this evidence. ZP deniers are shamed for having large families and rejecting scientific consensus. Decades pass and the predictions don't happen. People start examining the evidence with more scrutiny and with observed data in hand retroactively debunk a lot of the assumptions made. The hype dies and everyone forgets it ever happened. So I'm sorry if I don't instantly drop everything to make the hype of the day my top priority, but a lot of hyped problems don't last more than a few decades. If climate change is still being seriously discussed in 2036 (30 years after "An Inconvenient Truth" was published) maybe I'll take it a little more seriously.
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n 3/full/nclimate3224.html?WT.feed_name=subjects_climate-sciences
Climate models are actually better than meteorological models, but they predict things decades out.
(That's just an example for your example. I don't have an issue with structural engineers or anything.)
To me, the notion of getting the entire planet to reduce their CO2 production is laughable. People are still sold as slaves and dying of starvation in some parts of the world.
If global warming becomes a threat to humanity the only realistic solution is technological. It sounds like we already have the tech needed to cool the Earth as much as we want but we're still making a ton of noise about the impossible mission of controlling global carbon emissions.
I don't think anyone can deny that it's possible to cool the Earth by putting stuff in the upper atmosphere because we've already seen it happen during recorded history.
Imagine, for example, if the oxygen concentration was increasing instead. Would you expect humans to multiply faster and reach a new equilibrium because of it?
Concentrations have indeed been much higher in the deep past. The concern isn't destroying all life, it's damaging or destroying civilization.
There are theoretical techniques for blocking solar heat. It remains to be seen how effective or practical they would be in the real world. There is a lot of potential for unintended consequences.
10 Things You’ve Always Wanted to Ask an Environmental Scientist -- https://medium.com/greenpeace/10-things-youve-always-wanted-...
A clean nuke detonated over the ocean would do nothing. The whole point would be to produce vast amounts of dust i.e. be dirty.
You really believe this? We should blow up nuclear bombs in the ocean every few months to avoid a possible temperature rise an order of magnitude smaller than experienced during the yearly cycle.
Northern Europe, Japan and North America are roughly the most developed areas on Earth. They also have some of the most natural disasters and harshest weather.
Has anyone looked at common species from warm earth periods to predict storm severity? I remember reading that palm-like trees used to be the dominant type. These trees still are in island areas mostly because they are extremely resistant to storms. They have few leaves and thick trunks.
Are we setting ourselves up for a future where average wind speeds are 5x higher and hurricane-like storms devastate the landscape every year or so?
And sure, we could inject sulfur oxides into the stratosphere. That would create haze that would reflect sunlight. And it wouldn't wash out very quickly. There would still be some acid precipitation impacts, but probably not as bad as we saw in the 60s. However, that would be a huge endeavor, and would take considerable energy.
I don't see how this would be expected to reverse when concentrations continue to rise
As I understand it, we increase production much faster than plants can increase consumption, since plants need other things to grow that we aren't pumping into the biosphere in ever-increasing amounts.
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/rising-co2-...
Most recent study of methane flux/storage in the ESAS:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/2052/2014...
Arctic temperatures are estimated to rise 1.9x compared to global average:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005GL025244/full
During HCO the arctic is estimated to have been 4-6C warmer than baseline (yearly average):
https://epic.awi.de/38441/1/Beierlein_2015_Holocene_page1.pd...
That's not all that much. We're now already at 400ppm CO2, and recent unmitigated projections to 2100 (538ppm) simulate an arctic yearly average of ~ plus 8C:
http://climatenewsnetwork.net/arctic-is-set-to-reach-13c-by-...
So, are you willing to play the russian roulette game with the arctic methane? The PETM boundary showed a global average warming of 5C, mostly from arctic methane at a time where there wasn't even a large ice shelf, so with significantly lower capacity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maxim...
That would be in addition to the CO2 induced warming, mind you. That should make it quite easy to see how we're likely triggering a rapid warming to +8C (global average) or above. Rapid means it could come within a single decade since methane is that potent.
At that point, vast amounts of land on earth becomes uninhabitable from the heat aspect alone, never mind food production - you'll have mass migrations that top anything human history has ever seen. I suggest reading up on history as well, especially the late bronze age collapse which seems very interesting in its modern relevance.
You are not alone,
Any given plant's growth is constrained by something. Might be sunlight, water, phosphorous, nitrogen, or potassium. The last 3 are of course the main ingredients in fertilizers.
If a plant needs phosphorous to speed its growth, adding nitrogen won't help. And vise versa. What ever the Liebig Minimum, that's what you have to add to increase the growth, and you have to add enough of it for another factor to become the Liebig minimum.
Very few plants out there are CO2-constrained.
If you have any links to sources that show otherwise, that would be appreciated.
It doesn't matter how much plants and algea grow, when they die, they send the carbon back into the atmosphere and ocean. We have to sequestrate the carbon and totally remove it from the ecosystem.
Sequestration is what took millions of years, when major events buried large swabs of living matter in the ground "forever".
I don't see why death from climate change is worse than death by any other means.
Maybe you mean that we should minimise the number of deaths, which implies our ideal global population isn't much less than the current level. That's debatable.
I highly doubt the population will decline by so much, but there is nothing inherently bad about it. Even one billion people is plenty for a healthy global society.
This is an arrogant assumption. Another assumption, one I find more realistic, is that we're driving full-speed towards the cliff.
I'm really quite annoyed by your comment because I've already been through years of climate deniers telling me how 'arrogant' I am ot think humans could change the climate/derail God's plan/whatever, so I don't need pro-environment people calling me arrogant for a cautious assertion lifted out of its context, where I went on to talk about the likelihood of disastrous outcomes in the same sentence.
It stood at 280 ppm when record keeping began at Mauna Loa in 1958.
CO2 was 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
"The first monthly average carbon dioxide reading at Mauna Loa was 315.7 parts per million (ppm) in March 1958." [0]
[0] https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2015/06/02/am...
Higher the environmental CO2 level, more of it you need to dilute the air in the confined environment (i.e. buildings) to the desired level.
This means that you have to move more air that will require more energy directly but also indirectly through higher heating/cooling need.
It will also decrease the comfort due to more tangible airflow.
Every building has some designed air change rate with the outside that will keep its habitants alive and comfortable. This can happen through so called natural ventilation or through controlled ventilation.
As far I know, the common standard for the commercial buildings is 800 ppm (parts per million (1)) CO2 in the air. It is assumed that this level of CO2 would on average provide environment where people do not loose their productivity due to the air quality.
This is what I mean by diluting - part of the CO2 rich air inside is replaced with the less CO2 rich air from the outside.
Because habitants are producing CO2 with some rate, you have to replace the air with the rate that can keep up with this CO2 production rate.
If the air outside has higher levels of CO2 then more of the replacement air is needed and the replacement rate must be higher to keep the projected inside CO2 levels.
Replacing air faster will require more energy.
Disclaimer: I am not a ventilation engineer, I just got interested of this topic during the home renovation.
(1) Air contains about 21% of oxygen that is 210000 ppm of it. It follows that when the air feels "stuffy", it is not due to lack of oxygen but due to too much CO2 in it.
However, 400000 to 410000 is a very small percentage incresse
If we can't smack some sense into people we're doomed as a species.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_C...
You can get CO2 concentrations from satellite remote sensing, as well. Usually they use spectral analysis of CO2 emission/absorption lines in the infrared. This is a passive measurement, but active measurements with lasers are used in ground based and airborne measurements now.
These measurements are of CO2 within a given (vertical) column of air -- where the infrared light came from -- whereas the Mauna Loa measurement in TFA is localized to air moving past the sample station.
One starting place for CO2 data is: https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov
This summary of Los Angeles area ground based measurements hints at some of the complexities of integrating these different data sources: https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/collection-network/ .
Other pages on that site indicate the extreme spatial and temporal variability of CO2 in an urban setting. That's why the comparatively pristine Mauna Loa site is so important.
First off, I suggest you disregard politics and convincing your friends: Telling the ignorant masses to change their firmly held opinions and way of life is a waste of time. Do not delude yourself into thinking you'll get 5 billion poor folks (there are about that many) to not use coal power, or to not get gas scooters/cars. They will all do it - unless we provide a better alternatives. So your first action is to help make electric cars, solar power generation, and batteries as good as possible, and that means you go work hard as an engineer at one of these companies. Not an elec/mech/whatever engineer? Stop thinking so small; you have the internet, teach yourself enough to do a thesis level project and start applying. You can do this.
The second, more dire action is to help with Carbon Sequestration (taking carbon out of the atmosphere). What you need to do is replicate the Elon Musk model of directing the Human Colossus [0] towards Accelerated Silicate Weathering [1] - That is, crushing and spreading silicate minerals along all coastlines and wet tropical climates. There are two links; the first covers how Elon Musk uses commercially viable businesses to fund research and advanced engineering to create leverage. The second link covers the science behind accelerated weathering; The abstract is that the oceans naturally uptake carbon from the atmosphere by reacting C02 with cations in the water that come from 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.
The way you go about this is you copy Elon's model and make a business crushing rock. Thus, you must make mining machines and get into the mining business. Take a software based approach and use electric vehicles if you can. Vertically integrate, hire more engineers, get more clients and build a lot of machines. I think that's a good starting point.
Anyways, I've thought a lot about this and if you are concerned then these are the two things you ought to focus on. Don't try and convince people! We need engineering solutions not talk.
[1]http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html [2]http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf
And no, this isn't the era of the "highest disappearance of species". Not even close.
CO2 levels:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
The sources are all linked from this site.
Note that the CO2 level in the Cambrian was around 7,000 ppm, or about 17 times the level that this article is having hysterics about. Note that even during the Jurassic (when there were plenty of large land animals and a flourishing ecosystem) the level was about 3,000 ppm (7 times higher than the articles "threshold"). I repeat: the Earth was fine.
2. Extinction. The Wikipedia article I linked has a chart showing the proportion of species that have gone extinct during previous mass extinction. Note that the currently touted "mass extinction" is just a tiny blip.
* Consensus is that the elevated CO2 levels of the Ordovician-Silurian and Jurassic-Cretaceous periods came on over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, not mere tens or hundreds. This gave life a chance to adapt.
* Previous mass extinctions have been caused by things like complete ocean ecosystem collapse and massive asteroid impacts. Despite the fact that most of our current loss of biodiversity is mostly related to our homogenization of our surroundings, and not primarily climate change, it is certainly noteworthy and a little horrifying that it's reached a scale that comparison is meaningful.
People talking about worrying about the Earth are just using synechdoche to refer to humanity as we know it. I wish everyone would quit painting a strawman over this. The Earth will obviously be fine; I don't think any reasonable person will argue this point. Humanity's future is somewhat less clear.
Yes, that's higher than we would like. It's also 17 times higher than the level the original article is freaking out about.
"Consensus is that the elevated CO2 levels of the Ordovician-Silurian and Jurassic-Cretaceous periods came on over tens or hundreds of thousands of years,"
Link to this "consensus"? Thanks.
"it is certainly noteworthy and a little horrifying that it's reached a scale that comparison is meaningful."
Anything can be "compared". Did you look at the chart in the Wikipedia article? The current extinction rate isn't even a blip.
"The Earth will obviously be fine; I don't think any reasonable person will argue this point."
Really? So I've just been imagining all the people who are worried about turning the Earth into Venus? I mean, I agree that these people are unreasonable, but there certainly are a lot of them.
As for "the earth will be fine": yes the planet will still be here, but will humans survive this? In the past, these changes were far more gradual, letting life adapt.
As for "not even close", please show me a period when the rate of extinction was higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
2. Life is anti-fragile, so I think you're really underestimating humans and animals in general if you think a few degrees is something we can't handle.
Can you at least admit that humans are behind this rise in CO2? I mean, it's not like wind and solar energy generation is going to kill the economy. So why is this even debated so much?
I provided a link. Here, let me link directly to the graph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg
The so-called "Anthropocene" is at the extreme right of that chart.
Note that the extinction rate has been colossally higher not just once, but many times in the past.
Next.