The poisons released by melting Arctic ice
bbc.com
bbc.com
David Roberts put it this way:
> Basically, stopping warming at 1.5C would involve an immediate, coordinated crash program of re-industrialization, involving every major country in the world. It would be like the US mobilizing for WWII, only across the globe, sustained for the rest of the century.[2]
This is not happening and will not be happening because the the way our economic system is structured. Any country that wants to go first with the regulations needed will meet severe economic consequences. And well, time is too short for truly substantial coordination.
Deep adaptation[3] is our only hope. That and doing everything we can, considering the limitations imposed by geopolitics and our economic order, to slow things down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Global_Warmi...
We'll be struggling soon with the worst of climate change at the same time we'll run out of fossil fuels, with no serious alternative available. This looks decidedly like the "Business as usual" World3 simulation of "Limits to Growth"...
And yes, atmospheric methane does decay in decades but the point is that before it does, it depletes sea ice and warms the ocean. The absolute worst-case scenario in a runaway climate model is something like the clathrate gun. [2]
> "One of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, Peter Wadhams, believes an ice-free Arctic will occur one summer in the next few years and that it will likely increase by 50% the warming caused by the CO2 produced by human activity" [1]
[1] : https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf (sorry, not the primary source)
I enjoyed skimming through the Deep Adaptation paper. I expected a strategy for preventing climate crisis, but found a sobering look at how to approach it and deal with it.
Is this correct, or is it just hyperbole? Asking because it's not like melting permafrost wasn't a known potential problem 20 years ago, so I find it dubious that IPCC models might not have factored it in already. Might it be that the IPCC models don't account for the scale of the phenomenon turning out to be worse than expected?
The sea level chart on page 31 is particularly telling.
It’s infuriating how cheaply and seamlessly this problem could have been solved if we started gradually, 30 years ago.
Eventually large number of people will reduce large amounts of emissions. Corporations, governments, and other institutions will follow.
You will make a difference. You will also find after reducing driving, flying, meat, etc, that you'll wish you had changed earlier. You replace those things with other things you like more.
Positive-feedback has kicked in, so slowing down emissions will achieve very little. Because of positive feedback, even halting emissions might not be enough.
The only possible path I can think of to stem the catastrophe is a two-step plan:
1. The immediate enactment of a global carbon tax, priced high enough to materially reduce carbon emissions, and quickly.
2. Massive investment in sequestration technologies to help us scrub the air of CO2 and methane.
The challenge is colossal. Even if (1) could be done, (2) basically involves un-doing every emission of the past 20 years. Every mile driven must now be driven backwards, every good manufactured must be un-done...and with far more energy than it took the first time (thanks, thermodynamics!). And that energy must come from clean sources. And it must be done quickly; every day the carbon debt accelerates. Note, not grows — accelerates!
A friend once gave me the following metaphor. Imagine you have a glass jar, filled 1/16 with bacteria. The bacteria look up and say "we have plenty of room to grow!". Two weeks later the bacteria are half way up the jar. "Hey, it took us two week to get here, we have time to curb our growth".
The bacteria suffocate in about two hours.
Edit: Of course not emitting the carbon is better and more efficient but from a practical "affecting change ASAP" perspective sequestration seems like an easier pill for society to swallow. That should go without saying but I forgot that weekends here are basically Reddit and those kinds of things cannot be considered obvious.
The idea that carbon sequestation is an alternative to reducing emissions needs to die as quickly as possible. It's rooted in fantasy, not in facts.
All climate scenarios from the IPCC that don't end up in a huge catastrophy rely on rapid emission reductions. Most also rely on carbon sequestation for negative emissions in the future (which many think is too optimistic, because it needs yet to be shown that the technology can be scaled up enough). There is no scenario of averting catastrophic heating with carbon sequestation alone.
If that was the case we could have a strong carbon tax, which would actually be a very good idea, probably the most economically efficient of all. But they don't. People like to keep their money even if that means much less money for them in the long run because we don't have an economy in the sense we are used to.
It's clickbait titled and split into 8 parts, for who knows what reasons, but that quote is the tl;dr version of it. Exponential growth is unintuitive, and chasing endless growth is not going to work out well for us.
Even if the bacteria find another entire jar of open space - as much space as has ever been known, as much space as they have used in their entire history - a fully terraformed Mars hanging out in the back yard previously unseen - it only lasts a single doubling-time.
If it helps them lobby their politicians more, then sure. I mean, it doesn't, but if it did I'd take that trade any day.
> On what do you base that?
Purely on a sense of urgency. Individual action will--at best--lower greenhouse emissions by lowering demand for carbon intensive products & practices. How many business cycles does it take for these actions to take effect? We simply don't have decades. As well, a consequence of lowering demand of carbon-intensive products results in...a lowering of the price of carbon/oil. Increasing demand, until the slack is picked up elsewhere. The invisible hand is powerful.
A Co2 tax does the same thing as individual action--it lowers the demand for carbon, except it prevents the price from adjusting down. It is our only hope.
> For example taxes on gas have not been very successful for decreasing the amount we drive even though taxes on gas in many countries are much higher than suggested tax levels for co2.
By definition, then the tax is too low. Demand for gasoline is very inelastic, but it's not perfectly inelastic.
I don't think you understand the urgency. Runaway heating has started. We don't have 20 years. A draconianly high CO2 tax is our only hope.
If you believe that I don’t understand the urgency I was being unclear. What I’m saying is that when I’m been reading more on the subject I have started to believe less in a co2 tax. I much rather have for example draconian building standards because I believe that will give more bang for the buck than co2 taxes.
Without fundamental political and societal changes it feels like we're doomed. When big business can buy and amplify speech far more than concerned citizens, democracy won't be able to face/take the action needed.
It's much more important to ship 20,000 tons of Spiderman toys over the Pacific ocean for Christmas presents, only to bury them in a dump, because that's profitable. After all - you don't even buy stuff or spend money on flights or fuel, why should you even have a say or a right to exist at all? /s
Im well educated and informed enough to know that anything individuals would do now is pointless..
I also understand that nothing will be done to fix the problem by powers which are able to make a difference ( because its not "profitable").
Humanity as we know it will perish. Thats why I do everything I can to enjoy the ride. Im also preparing my children, by buying properties in safer places (safer in the next 50 years..).
Do you have any specific tips on how to lobby the politicians?
Promoting consumtion even more and selling out country treasures (land, forests) to pay for loans ?
And if you try to create new party to promote "not fitting" slogans, you disappear or have "an accident"..
World is a shithole now. Only way is to run away from all of this but not everyone has such possibility and there is not many places to run to.
Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
I don't believe it. I don't believe cruise ship operators or aluminium smelting companies will change anything based on whether a New York or Sydney person drives less often and nitpicks about plastic food packaging. They need regulating, hard, and that means a worse economy and unhappier people with lower quality of life paying more for goods "for their own good", and that means it won't happen.
I feel it unfair that I should lead the charge to hermit-life eating leafy gruel and nitpicking over plastic lids while my brother flies halfway round the world on international holidays - and he does that because he's annoyed that he should have to care about climate emissions from an occasional holiday while business people fly over the pond for a half-day meeting and while cruise ships exist.
This is the kind of personal feeling the anti-climate-change movement has to address to get people on board, and chastising people "it'll be a catastrophe" isn't enough. I know it feels like it should be enough, but it isn't enough.
not just your reduction, but you will lead others, who otherwise might feel alone, to join you.
Only if I tell them, which I won't. The sort of people who self-promote are driving the bad things of the world - envy, aspirational Instagram lifestyles, consumerism. And the people who tell people "I'm vegan" are the butt of jokes and the hated holier-than-thou preachy people.
The people who actually will reduce their emissions will just quietly do that, like they just quietly check up on an elderly neighbour without making a fuss about how great they are for doing so. Self-sacrifice for the greater good isn't catching like shopping and showing off is.
You will also find after reducing driving, flying, meat, etc, that you'll wish you had changed earlier. You replace those things with other things you like more.
That doesn't follow. My alternatives to driving are worse than driving, otherwise I wouldn't drive right now. And I like cake more than meat - but I don't want to replace meat with cake, thanks, that would be a bad trade.
Richest 10% are responsible for half of global carbon emissions [0]. I would guess many HN readers belong to top 10%. So what we do matters.
Another good news, apparently takes only 3.5% of the population to take an active stance on something to cause a change [1]
So, don't despair. If you are already started reducing your consumption - it matters. If you haven't - it's never late to start, especially if you are rich (relatively).
And of course individual action is not mutually exclusive with lobbying politicians.
[0] https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-ex...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=YJSehRlU34w
It is. It's too late to start. In the immortal words of Magnus Carlsen, Too weak, too slow.
I cannot express it more eloquently than this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcw-9UBFNWE
It sure doesn't. One person's consumption, no matter how extravagant, doesn't matter even the tiniest tiniest bit.
The only solution is massive, concerted, governmental action.
Just like one car doesn't pollute...
How did we end up in this situation if it isn't an accumulation of individual actions?
Of course individual actions matter, not necessarily because of their direct impact but because of the snowball effect. Look at how green parties started 60 years ago, it was hippies and nut jobs, today they make 10-25% of votes in EU elections.
I'm fairly confident that every individual I personally know would react with a bemused "how quaint" if I started riding a bicycle or eating vegan or whatever as a way of fighting climate change. I'm sorry, but I just don't foresee a massive number of people changing their lifestyles voluntarily.
Given these constraints, what provides a greater return on your investment of time and energy? Carving out your own sustainable lifestyle within a system geared towards suppressing your efforts, or getting involved in political organizing to change the system?
Among one of the initiatives mentioned is a startup called Tomorrow [1] that integrates with services (Uber, Instacart, etc) to calculate your personal CO2 emissions. They need help to get more of these integrations and more CO2 models. Consider giving a hand to them or other projects like this one [2].
* 2005 "NASA scientists successfully revived bacteria that had been encased in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years. ... Once the ice melted, they began swimming around, seemingly unaffected."
* 2007 "scientists managed to revive an 8-million-year-old bacterium that had been lying dormant in ice, beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica"
* 2007 "bacteria were also revived from ice that was over 100,000 years old."
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases...
This is probably true. However, it is possible—if highly unlikely—that something could be done. This would involve effectively halting CO2 emissions in the next 10 years and massive investment in carbon sequestration research.
Is this likely to succeed? No, not really. But why on earth would we be spending our time trying anything else?
(Well, I guess we could be spending that time preparing for the coming changes. Which we should also do.)
CO2 emissions will reduce to the extent that alternatives become cheaper, better and more convenient. And while that’s moving forward it won’t happen fast enough to prevent the problem from getting worse in the mean time.
So let’s stop kidding ourselves and prepare for what’s coming, both in terms of dealing with the consequences and finding ways to counteract the effects of ongoing fossil fuel usage.
On a personal note, what steps do you think an individual can do to prepare for what's coming as an individual/family?
On a personal level I would look at where you live and how that area is likely to change over the next 20-30 years if the current trends continue. And then either consider moving somewhere else or see what you need to do to deal with more extreme versions of floods, draughts, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.
It's not even likely to start to happen. Nobody is really moving that way, or has secured the political will and funds to do so.
Mad Max is much more realistic.
In November... 2018? Why do they link to an article from November 2016?
[1] https://weather.com/news/climate/news/north-pole-above-freez...
Here's a 60 sec video of how they clean off the large panels at a vast solar plant.
They could even be themselves solar powered, charging during the day when they are not working. And those people who operate them could instead go around after the "robots shift" to check for problems and fix them.
Am I vastly underestimating something here?
Is there any such equivalency for methane’s effect? Hiw much will that warm things?
There you have it: a blockbuster holywood catastrophe plot.
They weren't in favor of the general concept, never mind the individual schemes.
Mostly, there's no way to do controlled experiments.
All but the worst of the current IPCC scenarios require some sort of carbon capture even now, and the IPCC reports in general are very optimistic (what we know for sure is less bad than what we suspect might be true).
Carbon capture is classified as a climate engineering technique, and depending on how you do it it is feasible to accurately estimate the consequences. On the other hand, all techniques talked about so far need to be deployed on a massive scale, costing us a lot of resources, space and probably biospheres. The best cost estimates I've seen so far is ~200€/ton CO2 in monetary terms. The problem is that right now the research is not at the level it needs to be (another Manhattan project would be good), since there is no money in it.
Solar management techniques are indeed hard to consider, and would need to be kept up forever, which means that as soon as a war or just recession happens, we'd still be doomed, so this can only be used to buy some time and will probably have severe side-effects.
No, there aren't. Explaining why would be way beyond the scope of an HN comment, but consider this: if it were really as easy as you imply, don't you think someone who actually knew what they were doing would have put forth a detailed plan by now?
I think it neatly encapsulates the problem. Climate is big. Changes have huge hysteresis. The only real fix is emissions (lack of). What we've already emitted will be causing change for centuries. Any climate engineering is likely to be hilariously easy to over or under-shoot except carbon capture and storage. CCS is almost certainly going to be necessary as we likely need negative emissions now. At least CO2's role in the climate is becoming very well understood, and we know exactly how to fix an overshoot.
But that's simply not how it works, no matter how much money you throw at it. And you won't even have money to throw at it in the US at least, because belief in climate change is a political opinion.
Which is a strange state of affairs. In the European countries I am familiar with, all the mainstream parties agree with core mainstream science. Their voters largely do as well. They may have more or less credible plans to address the problem but they don't have their own private scientific conclusions.
Why is the US (and maybe Australia?) different? Is it because voters are ignorant or short termist, and politicians follow? Or politicians are corrupted and mislead their voters? Or just a higher level of scientific ignorance all around? Or a heavy dependence on fossil fuel prosperity in key districts?
Can someone suggest the answer? Clearly Europeans are not more intrinsically virtuous or sensible.
I would add Canada to that list as well. The current federal government has been trying to enforce a national carbon tax which has so far been met with siginificant resistance.
> Is it because voters are ignorant or short termist, and politicians follow? Or politicians are corrupted and mislead their voters? Or just a higher level of scientific ignorance all around? Or a heavy dependence on fossil fuel prosperity in key districts?
All of the above? :) And probably also corporate lobbying.
Another theory : if you live closer together you have a more visceral understanding of how you depend on the good behavior of others.
This:
Talk: "We believe in climate change"
Action: "Going to increase fuel mileage standards by 1%, that'll do it"
doesn't cut it.
Enough to mouth belief, not enough to demand action. It’s a smaller difference than it seems.
I can't speak to Australia, but in the US I see two significant factors. The first is the news and the second is the evangelical christian movement. IMO, both are rooted in perverse interpretations of the first amendment.
My understanding is that Reagan struck down laws regarding truth in journalism, which really set the stage. Fox News is particularly egregious in climate denial (as well as fearmongering about Muslim folks, immigrants, etc.), and for many, that's just the start of a slippery slope. Smaller, especially local radio, talk-shows around the country are even more egregious. They use fear-based arguments to significant effect, and because politicians use these arguments, they're "political opinions."
The evangelical movement (which gets a lot of play on Fox and other platforms) has positioned itself as anti-science: anti-climate, anti-vax, anti-evolution, anti-lgbt. So these opinions are elevated beyond "political opinions," they're sitting on the lofty perch of "religious beliefs" and challenging them is an assault on religious liberty.
p.s. pro tip: sell all of your Amazon, Google and Apple stock before we send out that email