Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted
reuters.com
reuters.com
The impressive thing is how quickly the glaciers are receding. The Nisqually glacier, which used to be down near 4000 feet in the 1970s is about a mile shorter. The ablation boundaries on many of the glaciers appear to be high up the mountain (like around 12,000 feet), which means they are going to shrink quite a bit more.
I didn't expect this but there's a possibility that many of the Mt. Rainier glaciers will be gone in the next 30 years. This is a massive change to ecosystems from sea level up to the highest peaks.
There is a delay of a couple of decades between emissions and effects on the climate. This means we are now seeing the effects from the emissions from the 70s and early 80s.
The problem is that we have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than the previous 150 years since the industrial revolution started. We have a huge climate bill to pay even if we magically stopped all emissions today.
That said it's not unreasonable to suggest that glaciers with an accumulation zone below say 8-9,000 feet will be toast. That takes out most glaciers in the Cascades outside of the volcanoes and a few peaks in the North Cascades. I was just eyeballing things based on having spent a lot of time on the mountain, but this conclusion seems to be supported by recent geological work. [1, 2]
[1] https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2017AM/webprogram/Paper299694.htm... [2] https://glaciers.nichols.edu/north-cascade-glacier-retreat/
Mt Rainier is also mostly composed of crumbly, friable rock, and I wonder just how climbable it would be without glaciers and snowfields to provide secure footing and keep rocks from falling down on people.
What's more worrying is the possibility we'll see some major collapses. Many of the big features on Rainier like Gibraltar Rock and the Willis Wall are anchored by ice at the base. As this disappears those structures may become unstable. It's conceivable that collapse could trigger lahars, which are a big risk for people in the valleys below the mountain. In the past these have run all the way out to Puget Sound.
The thickness and weight of the entire mountain is not a significant check on an eruption; therefore, it doesn't seem likely that removing a portion of the mountain (via collapse) would do more than vent some steam and noxious gases. Eruptions depend on what happens deeper in the crust, as I understand it.
Let's assume today, right now, humanity has found a miracle to produce zero emissions.
First let's consider climate lag [1]. There is a 40ish year delay between emissions and effects on the climate. So this means we are now only seeing the effects from the emissions from the late 70s early 80s. Here's the worst part, we have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than the previous 150 before that. So, we have a huge climate bill coming for us.
Second, carbon will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years[3]. Nobody knows how that will affect the planet but it's not going to be good.
Third. Consider self sustaining climatic systems usually called feedbacks like methane [2]. The hotter it is, the more methane is released to the atmosphere, so it becomes hotter, so there is more methane in the atmosphere, etc. There are dozens of climatic feedbacks which only god knows when those will stop.
I'm not writing this in a defeatist tone. Quite the contrary. We need to fucking wake up to the reality of this crisis. Humanity has to go all-in and pour all possible resources into clean energy, energy storage, and carbon sequestration.
[1] https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Dela...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedback
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...
FTFY. Life on this planet is probably going to stick around. What happens to human civilization is the more interesting question.
I'm continually surprised at how often people counter warnings about global warming with comments to the effect that life, in general, will go on. That's a low bar! Way lower than you'd accept in any other context of your life, I'd bet.
For example the heat wave in Russia in 2010 that helped fuel the Arab Spring revolts.
Our future descendants will heap scorn and curses on our generation, and we deserve every bit of it. Every politician that refuses to do what is necessary or finds it convenient to play stupid language games about 'settled science' is doing incalculable harm.
As citizens, I encourage everyone to reducing their carbon footprint as much as possible (yes, that means that your life gets comfortable) and voting exclusively on how credible a politician is on tackling global warming. If you are a wealthy person and aren't buying carbon offsets for all your emissions, you are a bad person.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=milankovitch+cy...
There are sites that suggest any number of things. Unspecified "sites" have little bearing on the actual facts.
I'm not sure that Milankovitch Cycles imply the dumping of CO2.
> Hopefully we can find a way to turn that into fuel.
This is the silliest and most thermodynamically backward thing I've read in a year. CO2 is burnt carbon. It's burnt. Burnt stuff ain't fuel; it's burnt.
You have to pick one. CO2 removal or creating energy. If you remove it, it must remain sequestered. If you create fuel from it, the CO2 will not have been removed.
I'm not against the idea of sourcing fuels from atmospheric CO2. It's a good way to get energy-dense fuel without adding new carbon to the atmosphere (assuming a carbon-free source of energy is used to synthesize the fuel). But that process won't remove CO2; it'll just not add more.
The problem isn't technology, the technology for genetically modifying alge or bacteria to consume CO2 and produce oil has been around for quite some time.
The problem is our powerstructures and our economic investments. It takes tremendous energy to move such a massive Goliath of a ship.
Our economy which brought us prosperity simply cannot move quickly enough to prevent our demise. Ironic and perhaps poetic really
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/07/carbon-engineering-and-harva...
P.s. this is the most incredible climate study I know of. This is a topological statistical analysis that doesn't rely on any specific climate model to draw its conclusions about the strengths of causal relationships. So there can be no quibbling about the model being wrong. That simply doesn't matter with this awesome application of dynamical systems theory, it needs no model.
Assuming there is a future generation :P
This is really the only important thing that we can do. Except maybe not flying in an airplane, there is little the average person can do in their daily life to inhibit climate change. Whether due to preventive policies or due to resource shortages our lives will change in the near future. Expecting individuals to shame themselves when the society at large encourages the opposite is counter-productive.
It is not to say that anyone is wrong to choose to live more frugally. More importantly, we need to recognize that any hope we have must come from the top down. We have more research and more solutions than we've ever had for any problem, but we don't have someone to pull the trigger.
Politics is so short sighted that unless there's huge pressure from the masses nothing will be done, or just too little too late.
Even if the Science backing up Climate Change wasn't solid, which I think it is, what's the alternative? Take a gamble?
The Roman Civilization probably collapsed because, among other things, the climate optimum they experienced at their peak changed drastically and crops became less efficient. A joke compared to what we might be expecting in a few decades with such an overpopulated and hyper-efficient world, which is really fragile to climatic disruption.
Here's an interesting article about it: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate-ch...
The key factor, apparently, was "... an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age,’ when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years."
(New theories should always be taken with a grain of salt, but I found it interesting either way.)
That requires strong political leadership and buy in.
American needs to turn back into the country represented by Captain America. They need to be leaders again, instead of acting like they're being run by one of those infant English kings from the Middle Ages..
Brr... The problem is that making quick money on scale seems to me like some kind of condition. Some biological hoarding gene that made sense just a hundred years ago.
Evolution have not kept up with our success at building and automating stuff made from stars. It makes me sad.
What we need to do is to update the rules of Capitalism to internalize the externalities. Make carbon expensive. Make environmental destruction expensive. Make exploiting labor expensive.
Do that and you'll see extremely rapid changes for the good. Only it will never happen because the people and countries currently profiting from coal / oil will fight it with the enormous $$ they have (and they are; people like the Koch brothers are always babbling on about how the government is run by a shadow 'deep state' - that's clearly true, and they're clearly being greased by oil money).
- most of all, speak out for reneweable energies and against coal
- if possible use some solar yourself
- try to buy an electric car or a real fuel efficient one, don't drive too much
- in general, try to use energy efficient devices
And finally, eat less, especially meat and highly processed foods. It's not free neither for you, not for the environment.
To the extent that we have lots of influential people browsing this forum, make it clear that unless to any politician that unless they aggressively tackle global warming, they won't get any donations/votes no matter how good they are in other areas / how much influence they have over the business you are running.
been reading into deep adaptation lately, kinda cool kinda pointless
We, presently, are deciding to do this and continue it.
Of the top of my head, asteroids, bio weapons, disease, the Sun, AI and authoritarianism are more serious. Especially AI - not being the dominate species anymore will be dangerous. But 10°C more? That just requires AC and migration.
Just look how poorly rich countries are reacting to the current levels of migration from less rich countries.
I was responding more to the callous nature of your comment than whether or not current warming trends are an absolute existential threat.
There are a lot of reasons such as whether food or water scarcity might trigger nuclear war. But the biggest reason is that it puts us into the territory of previous mass extinction events on Earth. This article does a good job of illustrating the worst possible outcome. It does belong up with the others on the existential threat scale.
http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
Give it a read and let me know if you think industrial civilization could adapt to these conditions.
2) We are probably already in a mass extinction event. That also has little change of causing human extinction - we're the most adaptable species this planet has ever seen.
"known colloquially as the Great Dying... approximately 252 million years ago. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct."
Seriously, it's a good article and quite short. I think you'd find it interesting food for thought and I'm honestly interested to hear your response to it, not some cheap dismissals.
Edit: if you really don't have time to read the whole thing, at least let me know what you think of the figure on page 6
Plants, rainfall, and harvests are susceptible to changes in climate.
Globally, though, I'd be surprised if we could last a single year if every food crop failed. You can already see what this looks like in Africa and the Middle East - famine affects entire countries at a time. Imagine if there was a string of bad years - say 10 or 15.
As a kind-of related example, most of the US would starve within a week if there were no oil to power trucks. Our current globalized food production/transportation network is extremely fragile.
I thought that nuclear was also a GHG contributor because of the fossil fuels used in mining and refining it. Is this not the case? Like there is some cradle to grave GHG coefficient for different sources of power...
Nuclear produces less presently and holds the key to producing none at all.
| Lignite | 1054 |
| Coal | 888 |
| Oil | 733 |
| Natural Gas | 499 |
| SolarPV | 85 |
| Biomass | 45 |
| Nuclear | 29 |
| Hydroelectric | 26 |
| Wind | 26 |
Here are the most impactful things you can do as an individual in a democracy:
1. Convince as many people as you can of voting for anyone who supports carbon tax.
2. Vote for anyone who supports a carbon tax.
3. There is no 3.
We need to internalise this negative externality into the very fabric of every transaction we make. By the time you can see a product you have no idea how much carbon was produced to make it.
Don't just walk back from the abyss. Drive back in the same car that got us here.
(by all means of course reduce your footprint, but don't forget nr 1 & 2. they must be front and centre.)
First of all, it will seriously destabilise a large economy where democracy still plays an influential role. This will place more economic power at the hands of non-democratic nations, allowing them to produce more CO_2 at will.
Secondly, the taxed CO_2 will just circulate back to the government, to be spend again. On what? Due to the strong relationship of the dollar with oil, each dollar spend by the government will involve burning oil and producing CO_2.
Third, how will you check the CO_2 emissions of your products? How do you prevent fraud? How do you make sure the system is not gamed by shifting the CO_2 burden to other countries?
No, if you want to make a dent, vote for those who want to invest heavily in renewables R&D (solar, hydro, wind, thermal).
-Vote for politicians that will regulate carbon
-Lobby your elected officials to regulate carbon
-Give to NGOs that lobby to regulate carbon
-Reward companies that sell products that reduce your carbon footprint and add value to your life.
-Pivot your career to work with green NGOs, on the staff or campaigns of green-friendly politicians, or companies creating greed products.
Do a few of these things and you can litter all you like.
And I am sorry to say that, but I don't think that a global framework enforcing the same environmental restrictions on every country in the world, regardless of its economic state, is realistic. Sorry.
That said, humanity has adapted to live in variety of environments, from African tropics to Canadian permafrost, centuries before the technological revolution. So once the global warming effects start noticeably affecting regular people, there will be a wave on businesses built around mitigating those effects, dealing with the causes and perhaps trying to reverse some of them. But before this becomes a pressing matter for pretty much everyone, I don't think there is much we can do.
Turn every thing you own upside down and find the scripture "Made in China".
Any clues?
This is just not true. World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions [0] I would guess a fair share of HN readers are in the top 10%
[0] https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-ex...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
It's pretty clear that if the west consumed less China wouldn't pollute nearly as much. So yes, everybody has a choice, either be actively part of it or try to pollute as little as possible.
You're saying "the impact of one person is limited therefore no one should take action". I'd argue that everyone should take action, show the example in your home, local community, &c. Little by little people get more engaged, just look at the green parties in Europe, 20 years ago they barely got 1% of votes in elections, now they get >20% in some countries.
We don't need a perfect global framework. We just need to shift incentives to some extent. The market is already coming up with some non-carbon alternatives. Adding a carbon tax will shift incentives further and increase tech development.
To mitigate the effects, business need an energy source. Either it's:
* a replacement to carbon, or
* still carbon
If it's still carbon, you can't reverse the causes, and mitigation gets harder and harder as you worsen the problem.
You're effectively arguing that:
1. There's no use trying now, it's basically impossible, but
2. Despite not trying now, we will solve the impossible problem at some future point.
You're perhaps arguing that the problems of global warming will help us. This seems rather like Bastiat's parable of the broken window.
Negative changes will only hurt us, and individual solutions can't fix a global atmosphere.
You hadn't mentioned this in your comment though, so I thought you were arguing something else.
Those frameworks already exist. There's a framework for CFCs that has been effective at slowing the destruction of global ozone. There's a framework that governs the disposal of radioactive materials. And yes, there's already one for greenhouse gases. The U.S. president just pulled the U.S. out of it. So, one thing that U.S. residents can do is vote for a new president who will put the U.S. back into it.
> once the global warming effects start noticeably affecting regular people, there will be a wave on businesses built around mitigating those effects
The fundamental problem is that real estate is by far the largest store of global wealth, and global warming will destroy some of that via sea level rise, and potentially alter some other parts by shifting weather patterns.
It is hard to solve social problems with profitable businesses in the face of large-scale declining wealth. That's usually called a recession or depression, and every time we've faced that sort of problem in the past century, the government has had to step in to help. In fact, addressing those sorts of problems is one reason humanity invented government in the first place.
And nothing individuals do will be enough. The top causes of CO2 emissions are industrial power generation, production of concrete, resource extraction, deforestation/burning forests and transportation.
Fact is, the world's population is still increasing, developing countries will still develop, developed countries won't reduce emissions, there's no stopping it.
Even in the US, the DNC struck down the 'Green New Deal'.
Either we're all doomed, or it's not an existential threat.
I like my guns and EV; don’t know why they have to be antipodal in politics.
I would just like to add. Absolutely vote. But please don't use it as an excuse to do nothing yourself. While you are waiting for politicians to act, start acting now. In case you are wondering what you can do yourself - here is a short list
- Stop flying to conferences. Go to a local meetup. It's fun. And cheaper. If you really need to get out of town, take a train. Let's hope one day Prometheus will give us carbon-neutral jet fuel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- Shift your investments from fossil to green. If you can't find enough worthy greens, shift it to anything else. Some say it won't impact your returns http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/the-mythical-per... Move your deposits and savings to a more sustainable bank. https://fairfinanceguide.org
- Work less. Work part time, and part of that part time remotely. http://cepr.net/documents/publications/climate-change-worksh... A firm lets its employees work four days a week while being paid for five. Everyone is happy, lower electricity bills, fewer cars on the road https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/asia/four-day-workw...
- Reduce your meat consumption as much as you can. They say these new vega burgers are not too bad. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat...
Thank you.
I would also add - stop or reduce discretionary air travel. Similarly to local meetups, there are often so many undiscovered destinations/events that can be just as rewarding as an overseas trip, without the 20+ hours in transit that are required.
No, it isn't. It's not even close. We can adapt to climate change.
The single scariest existential threat our species has ever faced is politicians and other public figures using FUD in order to convince we the people to give them more power. Which they will then use to screw things up even more.
"Credible" is one difficult part of that, and the situation is also exploitable even if they are credible in that one regard.
For example, a person or group could produce a candidate who is credibly stronger on global warming than the competition, while at the same time the secret goal being to sell out constituents' fiscal interests or rights in some other regards.
(It's not far-fetched -- without getting into contemporary partisan examples, it's fair to say that this seems to already a strategy and tactic, on other single-issues, in some contests.)
People generally want to do the right thing and they want to matter whereas in my experience the average person is not a great systems thinker. So people are very receptive to calls to "be better" because it let's them fight for what they believe set in a framework where their actions matter at least to some degree.
The problem is, these are problems of scale and systems, and once people think they are fulfilling some responsibility they aren't going to pursue other solutions, at least as aggressively.
If we straight up told people: you are going to experience extreme pain within your life time due to climate change, and the only single thing you can do that matters is to put pressure on your government to attack these problems systematically, I think we'd get much better results.
Meanwhile, we haven't really tried an effective government policy. One that would replace other forms of taxation with a carbon tax.
We've only tried individual solutions, dabbling around the edges, carbon offsets, cap and trade. Manifestly they haven't reduced emissions.
People may indeed view individual action as a substitute for collective action. But we wouldn't ask people to increase government revenue by making donations.
You would have to combine the tax with more serious measures like duties based on either estimated or actual emissions level. Or outright bans.
Additionally mandating certain important practices like garbage disposal, reduction and methane capture.
High tariffs on countries not following suit will take care of that. Try the carrot first but if they don't want to contribute then use the stick.
Don't worry, there are people saying this all over every climate discussion on HN. And then a huge distracting discussion about whether that's a good idea or not.
I might be being disingenuous but I see it so often it makes me curious. I don't know.
Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, called the most docile claims about global warming/climate change as radical, lies, socialism, communism, anti-business, pro-big government, and so on. The more aggressive claims were impugned as forms of eco-terrorism. It's the same today. The climate change deniers go so far as to insist that all of this is just delusional panic over nothing.
Michael Crichton, science fiction author, was a notable climate change denier who pushed exactly that: this climate change business is nonsense and people who claim otherwise are crazy. He wrote a book on the subject "State of Fear" about how global warming was a fraud, perpetrated by a few to exploit others.
A still sitting U.S. senator, James Inhofe from Oklahoma, says global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. And he cited "Dr. Crichton" and his book as the kind of real facts we need to pay attention to, and invited him to testify before Congress as a climate expert and scientist.
It's like humans are designed to make everything a dispute.
If we're aiming for more reasoned debate I'm not sure the throwing around of the 'denier' label really gets us much further forward.
Even if you went completely off the grid to live in the woods outside of the industrial civilization eating plants etc this wouldn't fix anything.
Yes, you would certainly reduce your emissions but this is not nearly enough.
Even if a miracle happened and we reached global zero emissions today there are already 415ppm in the atmosphere which will remain there for thousands of years.
Because of climate lag we are now only seeing the effects from the emissions from the 70s and early 80s. Even in 30-40 years when we can see the effects from our current emissions it will not stop there. There are many self sustaining climatic systems that will have been triggered and will continue to change the climate.
Humanity needs to invest all possible resources into clean energy and carbon sequestration. If we don't go all in during the next decade we are done.
Cite please?
> The lifetime in the air of CO2, the most significant man-made greenhouse gas, is probably the most difficult to determine, because there are several processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. The rest is removed by slower processes that take up to several hundreds of thousands of years, including chemical weathering and rock formation. This means that once in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can continue to affect climate for thousands of years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...
> There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere.
Apparently I'm a hateful person for noticing this discrepancy.
Probably because imposing natality rates would be quite unpopular. Humans tend to think having kids is an inalienable right.
China got away with it because China, but this would not work in other countries.
For example, when every home has roof-top solar, everyone is riding bikes or scooters, growing food locally, not flying, etc. It's harder for politicians to create new subsidies for coal mining, or tax concessions for airlines. Instead they will be more likely to pass carbon fee and dividend schemes or similar.
On the other hand, while everyone continues to drive around in SUVs, buy cheap goods from China, long haul flights all the time, and food from the other side of the world, it's easy for politicians to maintain the status quo.
Individual action can't solve climate change by itself. But it is still meaningful and necessary. Our actions influence the actions of others around us, and we can redefine "normal" for our society. Studies have shown that somewhere between 10 and 20% of a population acting in a new way are enough to shift the opinions of the remaining majority.
But there also ought to be a bottoms up culture change which encourages humans to recognize and self-limit their own impact. The world is too populous that our own actions won’t impact others at the new scale humanity exists. We won’t have political action without some parts or hopefully all of the culture embracing limits on our behavior. I don’t think these two approaches are mutually exclusive.
To address the parent comment here: Calling strangers bad people is very seldom a fruitful rhetorical approach, and I would advise against it. But individual action will end up being required someday; might as well start practicing today.
They won't. They'll be dead.
Up until very recently I thought this was the most important thing to do. The more I watch XR videos though the more I am convinced that that's not the case. Voting doesn't matter. None of the important social changes in the last century or so were initiated by the parliament. Think about women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti war movement, gay rights. We need to get out and get our hands dirty with direct action. Or at least support people who do.
Third world nations will suffer. Some might die. Maybe many. But humanity will adapt. We might lose a few hundred million in the next few decades until their folks find new places to live, and we westerners will suffer an influx of refugees, and we'll be just fine once again.
The population of the planet will continue growing to about 20 billion during the worst of the climate change. And we'll be without ice caps. And we'll be fine.
Healthy skepticism is great, but personally I'd rather not our entire species die off because a majority of people assume we will be fine!
> And we'll be fine.
Maybe we should then consider how to prevent hundreds of millions of deaths in the meantime? Like, the holocaust didn't lead to the extinction of humans as a whole, but there's a good amount of literature around what should've been done differently to prevent it in the first place, and that's an order of magnitude fewer deaths than what you're forecasting.
The really wealthy westerners are spending their money inventing ways to leave Earth. That might be a clue to whether or not they believe aircon and bottled water is going to be enough to save their way of life.
On what basis do you believe the population will hit 20B, especially with birth rates plummeting to near-replacement levels all around the world? What countries are going to go backwards, and why?
But our global civilisation will inevitably collapse. No-one can predict in detail what that will entail, but we can be sure it won't be pretty.
The sheer amount of suffering and destruction involved between here and there, human and more-than-human like, will be catastrophic. Everything present-day humans know and love will be gone. The existence of small groups surviving marginally in the crumbling remnants of our our once-magnificent ecosystems is no silver lining worth caring about.
Also this Australian briefing document on the existential risks of climate change: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_b2c0c79dc4344b279bcf23...
I'm a bit of a doomer on this topic but 25 years arguing about it doesn't seem to have yielded much action.
Here is his entire opening paragraph:
> It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the "natural" world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
* precious metal and fossil fuels, etc
* seeds, canned goods, grain reserves
* Buildings, wells, physical infrastructure on the land
* tools etc that last through time
Money is only useful to the extent it can buy things. If civilization collapses, then that's a destruction of wealth.
If output merely diminishes, that's also a destruction of wealth. It will still be better to be rich than to be poor, but even the rich depend on what society produces.
Weimar Republic made vast wealth disappear in moments. The US civil war came awfully close to full-on hyper inflation.
Look at Carthage [0], it was 100 years before major settlements began after their bronze-age war. No ammount of wealth saved their elites.
Look at the Zone Rouge [1] and the ecological effects we still see today. That land is just outside of Paris and used to be some of the most beautiful in Europe before the first modern war. Now it is toxic.
Look at Chernobyl or Fukushima. Radiation cares not for your credit card color.
True, in some of these instances, the wealthy could and did flee. But they had to flee to escape and could not stay. When the whole world is a Zone Rouge, where can they flee to? For how long? Time and again we see that it is not long at all.
Is there a website i can go to and check earth's health as a whole? Like we can check our own health. It would be good to have a place that lists our planets health against a bunch of vital signs
Just dreaming.
The fact is the IPCC is well aware of the political headwinds it faces and its reports are conservative -- they have always underestimated the likely outcome because it is hard enough to get sign-off on even that, plus the consequences of overstating it is harmed credibility.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC report came out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now, and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.[1] We’ll only lose 70-90% of the word’s remaining coral reefs (which are already down by about 50%, let’s not forget). Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated. Global fire frequency will only increase by 38%. Fish stocks in low latitudes will be irreparably hammered, but it might be possible to save the higher-latitude populations. We’ll only lose a third of the permafrost. You get the idea.
We have twelve years to show results.
Published 2018. Just to quote the few actual lines from the report summary:
"A.1 Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. (high confidence) (Figure SPM.1) {1.2}"
"A.2 Warming from anthropogenic emissions from the pre-industrial period to the present will persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term changes in the climate system, such as sea level rise, with associated impacts (high confidence), but these emissions alone are unlikely to cause global warming of 1.5°C (medium confidence). (Figure SPM.1) {1.2, 3.3, Figure 1.5}"
"A.3 Climate-related risks for natural and human systems are higher for global warming of 1.5°C than at present, but lower than at 2°C (high confidence). These risks depend on the magnitude and rate of warming, geographic location, levels of development and vulnerability, and on the choices and implementation of adaptation and mitigation options (high confidence). (Figure SPM.2) {1.3, 3.3, 3.4, 5.6}"
And so on.
As you see, very precise and very conservative. It is about what will happen between 10 and 30 years from now, due to the emissions that the humanity is just going to make (see A.2 quoted -- what was already emitted is not what is going to raise the average temperature for the next half a degree).
Watts: "Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated."
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15...
"Limiting global warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves, and about 65 million fewer people being exposed to exceptional heatwaves"
Watts: "If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050..."
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15...
"Limiting warming to 1.5°C implies reaching net zero CO2emissions globally around 2050 and concurrent deep reductions in emissions of non-CO2 forcers, particularly methane (high confidence) ... In comparison to a 2°C limit, the transformations required to limit warming to 1.5°C are qualitatively similar but more pronounced and rapid over the next decades (high confidence). 1.5°C implies very ambitious, internationally cooperative policy environments that transform both supply and demand "
"Liu et al. (2018) studied the changes in population exposure to severe droughts in 27 regions around the globe for 1.5°C and 2°C of warming using the SSP1 population scenario compared to the baseline period of 1986–2005 based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). They concluded that the drought exposure of urban populations in most regions would be decreased at 1.5°C (350.2 ± 158.8 million people) compared to 2°C (410.7 ± 213.5 million people)."
So it says: in case of 1.5 deg 350 million, in case of 2 deg 410 million. So it doesn't support your "Watts" quote of:
"Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought"
It's just a clear and inaccurate distortion of the original text, so distorted that it's wrong.
And we also know why it's so wrong and distorted: because these "commenters" just want to confuse people and muddy the waters, they aren't interested in the truth or accurately discussing the actual scientific work.
At +1.5 C, they're predicting that "only" 350.2 million more people will be exposed to severe drought compared to the baseline period. That's exactly what Watts says.
What do you think is distorted? You're mad that he didn't mention the ±158.8 million error bars on that estimate?
I feel like I'm talking to a crazy person here -- how do you read the exact same text and see "distortion" when it literally restates the same thing the dry scientific prose says.
It's not! Read your own quote!
"[compared to the baseline period of 1986–2005] urban populations in most regions would be decreased at 1.5°C (350.2 ± 158.8 million people) compared to 2°C (410.7 ± 213.5 million people)."
You have (accurately, IMHO) rephrased this as:
"So it says: in case of 1.5 deg 350 million, in case of 2 deg 410 million."
This is EXACTLY what Watts is restating:
"if we commit to these...tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.... only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events"
The IPCC report, your restatement, and Watts summary all say the same thing: If we take drastic action and manage to limit climate change to only +1.5C, then predictions are 350 million people will suffer severe drought. ("only" 350 million instead of 410m as in the +2C scenario)
He's not trying to "muddy the waters" -- he's trying get across to a lay reader just how desperate our situation is. If you prefer boring dry IPCC text, so be it, but so far none of these bland scientific reports have made any real policy impact.
The problem with "desperate" reformulations is -- despair. That demotivates from taking any action those who don't have enough understanding and start to look at the problem as either "it's hopeless" or are just "blocking out" ("it's so bad that it can't be true").
The humanity just need to act it its best interests in the sense to recognize that looking only for the shortest-term benefits harms the most of humanity already middle-term.
The only who can/hope to profit are the kinds of "arm dealers" -- the much less stable world (that is surely going to be a result of a lot of lives exposed to the new climatic conditions) is their direct "profit maker."
I understand the threat. I'm curious why the change described above though isn't somewhat welcome. It would seem that--at least temporarily--areas that are habitable now will become inhospitable, while areas that are not habitable now will be more welcoming.
~proof of concept
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/24/18273198/climate...
That is exactly what is not confirmed. It’s just a belief of the proponents.
There are some natural experiments: the Sahara feeds the Amazon, and the Gobi feeds the Pacific ... Perhaps more directed seeding would be more beneficial. We will never know unless we actually study, or try.
It is well known that in the normal conditions various bacteria degrade organic matter, which means nothing "dead" would really remain at the bottom. Typically all decomposing produces CO2 again.
So why aren't we looking at climate change as opening up vast tracts of the northern hemisphere to settlement and exploitation?
That's about 3x Texas + California combined. That's not even counting the northern half (give or take) of Canada's other provinces. Russia's Sakha Republic is ~3 million km2 by itself. If Sakha were a country of its own, it would still be in the Top10 by area (#8), just below India.
It's not just how they look on a map, these are potentially hugely underutilized tracts of land. All I'm saying is instead of the constant doom-and-gloom prognostications, let's figure out how we can maximize the efficient utilization of this land that MIGHT actually benefit from improved accessibility under warmer conditions.
Tundra when thawed isn't some magical land. It's all swamp basically.
GOOD LUCK with 100' deep bogs all over the place!
> Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognizable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.
Too bad we can't just use satellite images for this kind of research. Somehow satellite images are available for hedge funds to calculate the oil supply [0], but not for climate research. It's a shame.
We could have started solving this problem decades ago, and it would have cost a lot less. Time's running out.
Noone that can do anything cares.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20120422.htm...
If the DoD would get the Job of fighting climate change, i'd wonder what they'd come up with.
We can repurpose ourselves in order to save ourselves and the host organism.
Or kill ourselves and the host, just like cancer.
It's a choice we have to make as a world together.
Also, you're really not thinking even your own remarks through. If a person is 19 now, they could conceivably be alive by the end of the century.
Shouldn't we just be moving to something drastic like a massive sun shade project ASAP?
Doesn't that particular option seem like it'd be adding on extra unknown consequences? I wonder how that'd effect our natural CO2 scrubbers.
Not enough. Some countries that had it even ran from it recently (like Germany).
Nuclear has gone from very cost-competitive (5c/kWh) to not at all cost-competitive (alternatively: "financially risky," often shortened to "risky" in a disingenuous attempt to imply something else) because we gave NIMBYs and self-styled environmentalists a free pass to introduce arbitrary delays into the construction process, and they did, and it was very effective at raising the price / financial risk. That is what people mean when they say that we decided to stop building nuclear.
I was quite pro-nuclear in the 80s and 90s...
Personally, for most of the 21st century I've seen wind, solar, tidal and (pumped) hydro as increasingly more suited - far faster to bring onstream, and without quite the same scale of NIMBY delays of nuclear. A network of micro generators seems more suited to the adoption of community heat and power which also seems an essential part of reaching zero emission - as seen today in Ireland's emissions plan.
Sounds like China is making a go for it, though. Maybe in 20 years they can come build some plants to save us from the duck curve.
What is our plan to deal with carbon waste?
I've started thinking that people with good intentions are often the most terrible because they will never question their methods (or results) as their goal is holy and justifies all.
We need to start leaving carbon in the ground. Try to burn less fossil than the year before, instead of setting record after record. All green energy initiatives are just red herrings.
The updraft tower depending on configuration can transport large amount of dust upwards helping to create clouds, or condensate the moisture in the air (which is particularly effective in arid regions near the sea).
The balloon-solar plants would also help to reduce the temperature.
If we think it's really the case that most wild animals will perish in the climate upheaval, then doesn't that change the math a bit on how much risk we should be willing to accept when it comes to climate engineering? If the wealthiest humans could probably adapt to +5c, but a billion poorer ones would die, how much does that change the math?
Personally I'd be willing to accept quite a lot of risk to avoid these awful outcomes.
AFAIK the plans to put sulfur into the stratosphere are modeled on exactly what a volcano does, i.e. a natural process. Of course it could turn out bad, but it doesn't sound to me like a totally out-of-bounds idea.
Maybe someone with a better background could tell me otherwise? I only know about computers.
We really do need to get started before things get so bad we are unable to bring the massive resources to bear that we will need for something like this.
Slowly on the scale of individual people, but a quick snap on geological time scales, a process of change was initiated in the global economic system by the widespread climactic shifts. a series of events moved the global system towards a phase change which sealed Homo sapiens' fate. No one can pinpoint the exact minute, hour, or day, but at a certain point, global civilization lost the necessary level of coordination to mount the necessary sun shade project. Just as the ancient empires lost the ability to coordinate their own defense and trade in the Bronze Age Collapse, the world lost the ability to avert the next Permian-Triassic level event.
Intimations of war and shifting alliances were punctuated with alleged sabotage and contested destruction of satellites and the closing of the nascent space infrastructure. No one country felt safe letting the other country control the sunlight and the sky. Acrimony only increased when the first nuclear submarine was lost to the loss of buoyancy amidst the first spontaneous mass methane clathrate release. We luckily averted prematurely ending ourselves in nuclear fire and ash, but future generations might look back at it as a lost chance at quick mercy. Eventually, the petty geopolitical squabbles faded and almost everyone universally believed the science, but it wasn't until it was several years too late.
Dang, my most downvoted comment was asking an honest question about climate change.
Don't worry, I won't ask any more honest questions about climate change ever again.
A few of the key differences off the top of my head:
- The polar caps of mars are mostly frozen CO2 ("dry ice"), and also mostly disappear during the summer. You can see timelapse animations showing them shrinking and growing by like 90% each year. Their behavior is radically different from our frozen water ice caps, and have a huge difference in thermal mass too.
- Mars has a very thin atmosphere, mostly inactive geology, and no oceans. That means it has very little in the way of thermal buffering
- Mars goes through it's own Milankovitch cycles (changes in orbit eccentricity, axial tilt, precession) which means it undergoes it's own warming/cooling cycles just like earth. It happens to be in a warming cycle right now.
- Enormous dust storms can take over the planet for months at a time, which obviously has a huge impact on global climate
- We have a very short record of observing Mars' climate, so we can't really make long term trend analysis like we can on Earth
Unless someone can invent a technology in the next 5 years to pull the excess greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere and take us back to pre-1825 levels and keep us there going forward, this is a lost game.
It's like standing on top of the Empire State building and watching a balling ball go over the edge, we are at the point where the majority of the ball's mass has gone past the balancing point. We are close enough to recognize that it's happening but too far away to stop it from falling.
The next stage of climate denialism is climate nihilism.
It is not too late to mitigate some of the effects on our societies.
At the very minimum we need the political will to reallocate resources so that we stop accelerating the process and start structuring safety nets for vulnerable communities.