Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
"Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-a...
The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by a couple feet over the next 2 hundred years.
That's the science. Doesn't sound like doomsday to me.
> It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century.
When someone can rationally talk about what will happen in the IPCC predicted scenarios, which is the scientific consensus, then I will listen to them.
If you are some crank, who is talking about 1000 parts per million of C02, and 10 degrees C temp increase by 2100, well then you shouldn't be taken seriously.
The doomsday scenarios may be uncertain, but they do not (to my layman's understand) seem impossible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
The part you may want starts around footnote 20, in a paragraph that notes 4 degrees as a median projection from the IPCC, with up to 8 degrees at the high end of the curve without factoring in permafrost melt and its associated carbon release or any of a variety of other exacerbating factors (footnoted in the article).
There are ways to calculate how much effort or expense is reasonable to attempt to mitigate a risk, I believe that's often part of the job description of actuaries. Part of it involves figuring out what the cost is if the event in question happens, then what the likelihood of the event is.
For example, it explicitly mentions 10 degrees C of warming over the next century.
A 10 degrees C scenario is not something that any respectable scientist believes is going to happen.
The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be a 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century.
Thats the facts. Please listen to the scientists. Every single doomsday prediction that this guy is making, can be traced back to this fundamental problem that he is talking about scenarios that the experts and the scientists do NOT believe has even a remote chance of happening.
"a sufficiently large warming (roughly estimated as 5–6 ◦C, see Robinson 2000) would inevitably lead to an ecological disaster resulting in a complete depletion of oxygen."
Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
Why try one scheme when you can try two at twice the price?
That is the definition of research. Once something is discovered that works, it is called development.
> In this situation throwing money at the problem simply isn't the solution.
Why is funding fundamental physics research a bad idea?
> Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
Technology does not solve anything "for us," we choose to develop and apply technology. We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research.
It's not a bad idea and we are doing it. Fundamental research into fusion is happening on many fronts. That is a good thing and I am not arguing against it. There may even be good arguments to increase funding on some of those approaches.
I'm saying that a 'huge' increase in funding, as proposed, at this stage would be premature given that there are plenty of other alternative power technologies that are proving very effective. We already spend billions of dollars on fusion research. If we're going to spend huge amounts of extra funding on power generation, there are better ways to use it right now.
>We can decide to spend resources on solar and wind electricity generation and to fund fusion research
What do you think we should hugely cut spending on in order to fund this huge increase? Proposals to spend lots of money on this or that are somewhat unconvincing unless you can explain where the money should come from.
That is actually the easy part. Latest numbers I have seen are from 2009, when the US government paid farmers $5 billion to waste their time growing corn to turn into ethanol (basically to turn 1 barrel of oil into 0.7 barrels of oil equivalent), and paid oil and gas companies $7 billion in oil and gas exploration subsidies. Enough money for huge increases in both renewable energy and fusion research programs:
Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.
> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.
If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference.
Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.
The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]:
"Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere."
and
"Carbon dioxide comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources; natural sources are predominant."
[1] https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...
Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier.
The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels.
Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.
I assume you refer to Rick Perry. In point of fact the myth/reality portion of the page has been unchanged since at least September of 2015 [1], at which time Obama appointee Ernest Moniz was Secretary of Energy. Dr. Moniz has never denied the fact that the climate is changing, as far as I'm aware.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150912221729/https://www.netl....
The important part is that anthropogenic sources are a significant contribution to the net imbalance of those flows, because it's all in one direction.
It's like arguing that your spending, because is a small fraction of the amount of money you move between your checkings and savings accounts, won't make you run out of money...
Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.
Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.
The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.
It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.
If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.
And yes, it's the latter: formalized debt records that meet the 3 criteria we commonly define money by.
Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.
My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.
But it's sure becoming a popular theory.
Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...
Are you saying that human-caused global warming is a hoax?
It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.
Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.
Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.
Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.
Optimize the whole system. Localized optimization leads to decreased overall efficiency.
That's a broad generalization and far simpler model than what the poster is referring to.
Yes, riding a motorcycle instead of an SUV decreases all emissions. This is the simple base case.
However driving a diesel SUV decreases CO2 but increases NOx wrt to a gasoline one. This is the higher-order effect.
"Amplifiers that oscillate and oscillators that won't are the two great fears of analog designers."
Technically an amplifier with a feedback mechanism can become an oscillator and if you break the feedback loop in an oscillator you end up with 'just' an amplifier.
To make this even more interesting: a negative feedback element in an amplifier will greatly enhance the frequency response at the expense of amplification (and will vastly reduce the chances of that amplifier turning into an oscillator).
1. Most CO2 release is natural
2. We increased CO2 through our own efforts as well
3. [implied statement you may agree with: this led to a feedback loop]
4. We now may be too late to stop it merely by reducing emissions, if planetary emissions of stored carbon take over and become the main source of CO2 emissions
Is that what you were saying? You're getting downvotes because your first statement, while technically true, isn't very profound. Natural carbon emissions were counterbalanced by natural carbon storage.
But that might not be true if our additional emissions have triggered enough feedback loops.
We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years.
This of course led to a feedback loop.
Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.
For civilization to survive, we must adapt, mitigate, or both.
Thats the science. And it doesn't sound like extinction to me.
Yes, extinction seems unlikely. But the planet's ability to support the current population could easily be a casualty.
But since we pushed the system to a new state, its net emissions may dwarf our own emissions. Then things get even harder.
It's already happening. Natalia Shakhova has been studying this for years.
This is technically true, but I think it misses the point.
It's like complaining about Jeff Bezos being financially irresponsible because he bought a yacht. It might be financially irresponsible for you or me to buy a yacht, but Jeff Bezos's bank account is much bigger, and refills much more rapidly.
It's true that the natural carbon cycle involves a lot of sequestered carbon being released into the air, but nature actually consumes a little bit more carbon than it emits. If we left the natural carbon cycle alone, atmospheric carbon would decline.
Human industry is fundamentally the opposite. We emit CO2, but we don't sequester it in any significant way. Nature may pump more CO2 into the air than we do, but it also absorbs far more than we do. In fact, once nature consumes all of its own CO2, it consumes roughly 40% of what we put out there. The remaining 60% of our output is why atmospheric carbon keeps increasing.
One theory is that agriculture prevented another mini-ice age. I don't know where in the "believe, but cannot prove" spectrum this theory lies (a la http://edge.org).
"Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate."
Complex adaptive systems. Disrupt a system's equilibrium and you get chaos. Hard to predict, mitigate.
Sadly true on so many levels.
Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
Compared to what? I think you should be happy with what you've got, because it's the best we've ever seen. I'm happier with a species that could burn out, than one that could do no wrong. If there was a problem, yo, we'll solve it.
I mean, you never know when you might need it, right? :)
The problem is that there is no game theoretic advantage in cooperating to reduce CO2 unless everyone cooperates. If one large player (e.g. USA or China) or many small players do not cooperate then the incentive flips and it's actually in everyone's best interest to defect. If catastrophic climate change is going to happen anyway then you are better off burning as much CO2 as you want to build up your economy so you have a better chance of mitigating the damage. It's basically a variation on the prisoner's dilemma scenario.
At the moment we're a tribal species that builds colonies, we just haven't evolved to fit into them yet.
In evolutionary terms we have literally only just managed to build a technological society. Therefore it stands to reason we only recently evolved sufficient intelligence to do so. Otherwise we'd have done it sooner. In the grand scheme of things we're on the very lowest bottom level of the sentience hierarchy.
If there happen to be any other sentient species watching us, I can only assume they spend most of the time face-palming, head-shaking and eye-rolling.
Or they see us as a natural phenomenon following similar patterns to other fledgling civilizations. We don't roll our eyes when a pathogen is so virulent it kills its host before it propagates.
We'd probably still be a dinosaur-populated planet if not for a random asteroid.
I'm personally not invested in the environment-preservation fight at all.
Life exists in this universe, it's a part it's nature and so is consciousness. Whether by design or by some random chance, it is self-evident that it exists. Not only that, you can find it adapted to the extremes of every environment it encounters.
Suffering is the engine of adaptation and everything we consider valuable has only come about through the immense suffering and sacrifice of those that have lived.
We, as conscious life, are the only known species which have the possibility to adapt to an environment outside of Earth. I believe, without any external spiritual input, that our responsibility is quite clear.
How much suffering is a function of the zero-sum game that is played in our (mostly) closed environment? Yes, expanding into space may increase the overall number of individuals suffering, but isn't it really suffering per capita that should be the measure?
Suffering isn't to be ignored and I believe seeking to reduce when possible is admirable and morally right... but to abdicate our responsibility to the process of life and allow it halt (which it will eventually on this planet)? Simply because some people feel bad about things sometimes? No, I'm not buying it for a second.
I don't have proof of this, but I think most creatures have some amount of awareness, progressively decreasing as you descend the great chain of central nervous system complexity. Probably decreasing quickly at first, from humans to primates to regular mammals, and more slowly afterwards, until asymptotically vanishing into virtual nothingness as there's no complex nervous system to speak of anymore.
Perhaps we're at the bottom of the interval of what could be called truly self-aware consciousness, as opposed to, I don't know, maybe somnolent or lethargic or dimly awake consciousness. With that I would agree.
Which of course automatically raises the question: why should the ascending arc stop here? And what do the next levels look like? Probably impossible for us to imagine even in principle, but still.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
Smallpox, eradication of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication
Perhaps that indicates that reason itself has some hardcoded fundamental limits.
I think that was meant to point to the individuals, not the species as a whole and that's exactly what causes this problem. But we're working on the hive mind as we speak.
Many countries have agreed climate change is a serious problem and have acted on it, and for a long time. The U.S. is a major exception. It's doable; the Republican Party in the U.S. is the problem.
There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268...) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the video, though I highly recommend watching the whole thing).
They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly boned.
Unless we choke to death on methane isn't this less of an issue than CO2 buildup?
0) http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7739.full.pdf
1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/dayearthdied.shtml
In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
Nobody is really sure if this would actually happen, though.
The big problem is tipping points. There are a lot of things where an initial big hit can be something you don't recover from, no matter how light the impact might seem when measured over years.
If such feedback loops could be that dire and unavoidable, then they would already have happened direly and unavoidably. It has been this warm before, in the not-that-distant past by geological standards. If there's anything unusual about our current situation, it's the rate, not our current location. That does not mean that bad things or things we won't like can't happen, but we can't be sitting on a metaphorical bomb, or it would already have long since gone off.
That's a strange argument given that previous variations in climate indeed were very severe...
The Holocene Climate Optimum is the nearest thing in the last few hundred thousand years and it wasn't anywhere near this warm globally. What it did do though is melt the Laurentide ice sheet, dramatically raising global sea levels. But the ice sheet protected the North American continental tundra. Nowadays there's no ice sheet there any more to absorb the heat and stop the tundra melting and releasing its CO2 and methane.
Look up the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum though. That's the nearest equivalent episode to what's happening now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Max...
There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us.
- http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes-new-...
- https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben-mezri...
Alaska is only one area of the Arctic where permafrost
soils could be emitting carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. Permafrost regions in Canada and Siberia are
even vaster. But the new study’s lessons could also apply
to those areas, researchers say.So these Russian scientists, the Zimovs, roped up a huge section of the permafrost starting in the ‘80s and are repopulating it with these large animals: reindeer, horses, bison. They’ve been able to lower the temperature of the permafrost by as much as 15 degrees [Fahrenheit] by reintroducing large herbivores. The mammoth project is all about this. If we can introduce a mammoth herd to the tundra, we can maybe save the environment for another 100 years, because they’ll help put into place these very natural processes to keep the environment colder.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions#Contr...
"They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve"
It's safe to say we're soundly screwed, and probably were screwed before we could realistically do anything about it. Anything we do now short of killing off 80% of the population and the other 20% living like native tribes men, won't have any real affect, it might slow it. Unless we come up with some solution the counter the feedback mechanisms and extract/recapture these gases from the atmosphere.
That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the U.S. commercial sector in a single year."
Anyone whom wants actual facts ought to watch Paul Beckwith out of University of Ottawa on YT for detailed updates and analysis on climate change.
Hell if you want a good scaremongering, there are some old Van Impe videos around somewhere.
Rainwater hits mountains and dissolves silicate minerals into cations that flow into rivers and then oceans. The oceans naturally uptake carbon from the atmosphere by reacting atmospheric carbon with cations in the water that come from those dissolved silicate minerals. This uptake de-acidifies the oceans and produces food for ocean life; for us to collect all the carbon produced in the USA last year, we would need to crush about 60km^3 of silicate rock (which is in abundance) and spread it along coastlines.
To successful sequester enough carbon to save the ecosystem, this might one of the best options we have. This paper [1] does a good job of explaining what I've touched on here.
[1]http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf
This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide).
I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmosphere. China has developed a way to leave carbon in rock. Meanwhile we have had a way all along - TREES! Those and algae in the oceans.
The "answer" I often hear is that the carbon will eventually be released when the trees burn in forest fires. Well, first of all, what matters is the overall biomass of trees. And secondly even if it didn't, that buys us many decades.
PS: How come this is being so heavily downvoted?
Much if not most of the deforestation in the United Kingdom took place in the Middle Ages and later, to extract resources during the Industrial Revolution. For example the Caledonian Forest in Scotland experienced massive destruction following the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries. William the Conqueror had large tracts of forested land set aside as protected parks that were later destroyed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_forests
The prevailing political and economic system.
We need method of fixation that is both permanent and does not have the constraints that tree planting does.
https://qz.com/1010273/the-algoland-carbon-capture-project-i...
(wood burning power plant is the second subject, under How to heat a cold country in the 21st century section)
"Maintaining" the forests simply involves restraining humans from interfering. Or even better, chop the trees down and replant, using the wood for construction after fireproofing it!!
There's no money in it? Whereas there's plenty of money in deforestation.
Tragic, but that is the world we live in.
The larger bamboo species grow faster than any tree, and can be exploited by the human economy on a shorter timescale, thus making people more likely to plant bamboo forests on their own initiative.
Grow bamboo. Cut it down. Use it for building and consumer products, such that its carbon content does not quickly return to the atmosphere as CO2 (and hopefully never as methane).
Pulling the above off in an energy positive way is left as an exercise to the reader. (read I am not sure you can, but I wish you would)
This is usually useless forests and they're not very good because succession fails on them due to unbalanced ecosystem, but that's what is aplenty.
Where would you expect new forests to appear? I mean, Eurasia is so huge it probably has more forests than the rest of the planet combined. Most countries only cover a marginal area of the globe and so they can't possibly cause serious reforestation impace.
There is a lot of land that cannot support a forest though.
Where we really go wrong is not lighting forest fires every year. As a result dead trees build up until the slightest spark (lightening) results in a hot fire that burns up everything in a massive fire that cannot be controlled. All the carbon turns back into CO2. If instead we lit a fire every year the smaller cooler fire would result in a lot of carbon that isn't turned into CO2 and just sits on the ground. The result is sequestered carbon in the form of charcoal.
It also isn't worth it because one cheap way to get rid of a house after the end of its useful life is burn it.
Also, I hear nuclear winter is really 'cool'. We could always start a war in Korea...
http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/08/22/permafrost-thawing-faster...
And they're citing an April 2017 published paper: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n5/full/nclimate32...
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/AK/3_rid/waterfront_at...
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/life-glacier.html
https://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/11/Pio_XI_Glaci...
@
Sea levels drop.
b) What secondary / tertiary / ... / n-th order effects would that have? I'm guessing you don't know.
and we have no leadership to guide our response.
and we can't winnow our way out of this alone.
what now?
The answer to "what now" is start a company that is in the business of carbon sequestration or climate affect mitigation and become a leader. It's obvious!