Sea 'Boiling' with Methane Discovered in Siberia
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
And I meant problems. As in, protecting the food supply chain, protecting the electronics supply chain, adopting a defense posture to prepare for a far more desperate global population, finding ways to save coastal cities or quickly relocate people, throwing everything at the wall for innovative new exotic energy generation and storage systems (far past nuclear) and, most importantly, preserving the knowledge and means of humanity.
We're past the point where pretending this will get fixed politically is reasonable. We need to assume it won't and work to protect the future in spite of the horrors to come.
Basically it's like most geoengineering projects - everyone is too afraid of negative consequences to really try anything at scale, so instead we get endless inconclusive studies. Personally, I think we're going to pretty quickly get to the point where we need to make decisions about what negative consequences are acceptable to prevent complete environmental catastrophe.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/453704b
[2] http://www.planetexperts.com/two-years-russ-george-illegally...
EDIT: Inhospitable atmosphere, to my mind, includes weather, drought, flash floods, etc. Not just the chemical makeup of the air.
Oh, please. The atmosphere will be perfectly hospitable. This is just FUD.
These are not predictions based on data. They are predictions based on models--the same models that have been overpredicting warming for several decades now.
The actual data says that extreme events have not been getting more frequent. Their consequences have been getting more severe because so many more people live in areas that are primarily affected by them. That's not a climate change problem: that's a problem of mismanagement and politics. The southwest US has been a desert for centuries if not millennia--now all of a sudden lack of water is a problem? Anyone with half a brain could have seen that coming. Coastal cities are finding problems with drainage? Sea levels have been rising since the last Ice Age ended, and if your coastal city in a hurricane zone suddenly has a problem with a storm surge, that just means you've been ignoring the problem for too long.
Yes, the climate is changing; it's always been changing, and it will keep changing. People need to be given accurate information about risks and the tools to adapt to change.
From what I've heard so far, scientists have been underestimating the nature of climate change, almost perpetually, like any good scientist should do in order to keep their reputation.
2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7890988.stm
2019: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...
I do not have enough in-depth understanding of climate sciences in order to fully comprehend the articles you've attached, nor can I be bothered to (there's no attempt to make it accessible for the layman), but the comment section appears to be quite telling.
Does that sound rich to you? Well, I'm a simple programmer, not a climate change specialist, but Judith Curry OTOH is, and she has chosen to "not “bother with” peer-reviewed journals, in favor of publishing her own papers so that she could editorialize and write what she wanted “without worrying about the norms and agendas of the ‘establishment.’”"[1]. In other words, she's a lone scientist defying the consensus. Maybe she's our modern day plate-tectonist, but in all probability, not.
EDIT: To summarize, why even write (apparent) highly scientific articles if you're ignoring all the other scientists? To me, it just seems like someone wants to appear that way.
[0]: https://twitter.com/carbonbrief/status/913361157846597634
And yet you have no problem accusing the authors of "cherry-picking" and exaggeration. Amazing how people refuse to accept that ignorance and refusal to look at the facts disqualifies them from having an opinion.
Btw, Judith Curry has plenty of published peer-reviewed papers; even the Wikipedia article you reference notes that (apparently you can't be bothered to read that either). She took the position you describe in 2019 (according to that same article); her doing so was based on bitter experience with how much the peer review process has been hijacked by ideological partisans.
If you think Judith Curry is the only scientist who questions the "consensus" in climate science, you are extremely misinformed.
Sure, this could just be an isolated event, but there sure have been a lot of record breaking isolated events these last couple of years.
Our current global political structure can't coordinate such action. So what will left to be done is dealing with the mess.
Big countries will have a lot more room to weather this, but small countries are on their own.
The simple answer is end fossil fuels. How do we do that? Vote, eat less meat, bike ride, strike, protest, invest in solar, boycott, reuse, buy less, telecommute, etc. Use your imagination. Do something, do everything, the end goal is we all stop releasing sequestered green house gasses into the atmosphere.
Build nuclear power plants.
All the other things are fine, but if you really want to end fossil fuels, you need a non-fossil-fuel source of reliable base load power. Nuclear is the only one we have. Other sources are fine, but they can't produce reliable base load power.
And, btw, I think we should end fossil fuels even if it turns out not to make much of a difference to climate change (which might well be the case since all of the models that have a high sensitivity to CO2 built in have been over-predicting warming for several decades now).
And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
Renewables has already surpassed nuclear in the US. I think the new reality is the best time to build a nuke plant is never.
Are you thinking in terms of dollars or including the price of future use/materials? In other words, can’t a nuclear plant effectively be swapped in for a (e.g.) coal-fired generator and Just Work, versus all the materials (grid-scale collectors, batteries, etc), which is just the next generation of junk in a treadmill that’s still a carbon problem?
I ask because I don’t know.
The waste stream from solar is a real question. The video posted in the other reply brings it up as well. We definitely need panels that are designed for extremely long service and recyclable end of life. I do think the battery tech is evolving extremely rapidly and dovetails with EVs so that will help keep renewables competitive even as total overall renewable supply share increases.
Currently the US defense emits a non-negligible amount of CO2 [2]: "If it were a country, it would have been the world's 55th largest greenhouse gas emitter, with emissions larger than Portugal, Sweden or Denmark." [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/700462955/former-defense-lead...
[2] https://www.livescience.com/65698-defense-department-climate...
We should do everything, though, including nuclear. i'm a big nuclear fan. All at once, right now.
And that's probably even also considering that both the actual cost of nuclear[0][1][2][3], as well as the risk of failure[4][5] and the therein resulting costs[6] are often wildly underestimated.
[0]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4631737.stm
[1]: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/01/31/debunking-the-low-cos...
[2]: https://financialtribune.com/articles/energy/9386/nuclear-de...
[3]: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/true-cost-of-nucl...
[4]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4543400/Scie...
[5]: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-nuclear-greatly-underestimate-...
[6]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
Make operation of diesel cleaner and thus more expensive so that sails and PV would be considered and used as well.
Increasingly, I find the best thing to do is get your affairs in order, do not birth a child, and try to enjoy what is left of this life before it’s all over and the world cooks to death.
If life must have no purpose, then you might as well choose to be happy. And I mean it. BE happy, before it’s too late.
I really can't see this being turned around unless a major technical breakthrough is discovered which I consider fairly unlikely.
At this stage no one knows exactly how bad it will get. I've got between 30 & 40 years left (and no kids) so I don't think it will be catastrophic in my lifetime but I still have basic plans in my head about becoming more self-sufficient in the future as one way to deal with a potential fallout should there be some kind of calamity in the future.
http://www.walkthroughindia.com/walkthroughs/top-15-biggest-...
https://www.news18.com/news/auto/bjp-led-nda-government-mull...
On the wikipedia "list of photovoltaic power stations", China and India turn up on top when sorted by plant capacity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...
So yes it would be great if they can make progress but I will hold judgement for some time.
People won't go for being shamed into reduced wealth, especially when the shaming is coming from comparatively rich people. Try to force it on them and you will get a populist revolt.
So by all means keep preaching 70s style lifestyle shaming environmentalism if you want another 50 years that looks identical to the last 50 years. People will listen, nod, and ignore, just like they do with sexual moralism.
The answer is to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, nuclear, etc. and to electrify transport and industry. Replace as in generate the same or even more energy. As I say this I live in a place where as much as 50% of my power is solar on some days and I drive an EV. We are close to cracking the storage problem with better batteries and scaling production of them. This is very possible.
Sort of like how you cut STDs and unwanted pregnancies by making contraception available and guys putting rubber things on their willies. It's what works. Only ideologues oppose it.
I agree.
> So poverty.
Don’t be so dramatic. Would it kill you to turn the thermostat up while we convert our global power infrastructure to renewables?
My list of example actions one could do to to fight climate change was not exhaustive or exclusive.
No real sacrifice involved -- other than giving up our entrenched mental models that dictate we can either be good or we can have satisfaction, but not both.
That's true along the white/blue collar divide in the West and even more so between the developed and developing world. Think Africa is going to listen to the people who used to gather slaves from them and colonize them tell them they can't do what everyone else is doing because we need to save the Earth? The response will be "fuck you, we're poor."
Hell France's vast yellow vest protests were in part triggered by a gasoline tax. Egypt's revolution was in part triggered by rising food prices. Reduce = revolt. This is because anything that increases prices of consumables amounts to a strongly regressive tax. It hits the poor much harder than the rich.
So I get what you mean but I think that whole rhetorical line is actually counterproductive. Focus on replacing fossil fuels. That matters far more than little token reductions anyway. Replace coal with solar and gas cars with EVs and the carbon reduction is large and more importantly persistent.
Personally I like to frame it as progress. Solar could in fact scale much larger than fossil fuels. In the future it could actually provide cheaper more abundant energy.
It will all naturally happens over the next several decades as the cleaner tech becomes technologically superior as well as cheaper.
The investment needs to be made as a way to improve infrastructure that provides better service at less cost, not as a “shut it all down” panic - or else the damage of forced switching itself will be measured in the trillions.
Any climate change that’s happening in the next 10 years is happening regardless of net CO2 emissions over those next 10 years. In reality, the solar minimum we’re in will significantly mitigate climate impact in the short term while the technology for cleaning up is rapidly advancing.
While eating less or no meat is a big part of it, it's more nuanced than it's often presented. For instance, this talk provides a very, very good argument for keeping livestock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
Not disagreeing with you, only replying to you for visibility/to add on to what you said.
Also separate programs to identifying war scale R&D to identify topics and research them widely. Adjust contracting criteria for ability to pass scaling gates instead of financial or other criteria (this is the war terms for us).
Labor programs for rapid training and factory capital deployment.
What could help shorter term is adaptation. Moving cities to higher ground, away from oceans. And building dikes, where it's workable. But not in Florida or New Orleans. Maybe not even for New York City.
Also moving populations to areas that require less air conditioning. And moving farmland from areas that are becoming more arid. So generally, poleward.
And then there's immigration. As others move generally poleward. Targets could block immigration, and build walls where feasible. As the US and UK are doing. Or they could focus on integrating immigrants, as some EU nations are doing. That seems like the best long term strategy. Otherwise, you're going to have huge refugee camps, near borders, and probably end up killing lots of people.
And then we have social and political implications. I have no clue about that. Except to extrapolate current trends. So socially, that would be increased concentration of wealth, with the wealthy increasingly isolating themselves from the poor. And politically, increased authoritarian control, with associated surveillance.
Interesting times, for sure.
Sulfate aerosol injection is by far the most promising. And cheap - maybe 5-8b per year [1]. I'm not claiming this is a good idea in any way. As they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. We could buy ourselves several decades to sort our (as humans) shit out. We don't understand the unintended consequences very well, but at least this technique mimics natural processes (volcanic eruptions).
[1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...
[1] Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The calthrate gun would more likely be the result of volcanic or continental landslides that mix warm surface water with disturbed sediments.
This is probably a product of local geological activity.
The calthrate gun is on geological timescales, if we've created enough warming for the reaction to become self sustaining (releases create more warming, creating more releases) over thousands of years then we have fired the gun.
There is clathrate under the permafrost, but I doubt that it's substantially vaporizing yet.
It would certainly lead to increased local temperatures in the short term, but it would remove the methane problem, and if we got enough carbon into the air we would eventually see a "nuclear winter" type cooling effect. This is obviously Bad and we'd need to burn a fantastic amount of wood to accomplish it, but as far as I know it's the only readily accessible global cooling mechanism we have that is practical to implement.
The problem I could see though is that it would likely speed up the melting of the Arctic. I'm sure there are really complex tradeoffs and someone would have to study them very carefully.
Intuitively I expect the gas to dilute very quickly, making it hard to burn efficiently over large surface areas... how much energy do you put into the fires vs. the amount of gas that is actually converted to CO2. It doesn't help that the methane will rise. All that energy will just go into quickening the melting of the Arctic. Which will also hasten climate change.
Like yeah if you could visualise methane pockets and target them with lasers to the point of combustion as they erupted, sure that could maybe work and much more efficient at converting the gas. Still seems far fetched though.
If all we have to do to cool the earth is as simple as explained above, then global warming is solved.
Also yeah a lot of people don't understand climate science!
It's still a serious problem and we need to address it, but I keep seeing emotional reactions that ignore the science and the current predictions.
I do already, the weather is much worse than when I was a kid, much drier and the heat waves are harsher.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climat...
The effects so far are small compared to the direct damage caused by the air pollution itself, which kills over a million people a year.
I don't expect that will change in my lifetime. The predictions are not so dire that it is likely to take a million lives a year.
Over a period of several hundred years, it's a lot harder to say.
At no point is it likely to be the end of civilization. But we could get there if we're stupid enough to keep this up for a few centuries more.
The 10 degrees warming after the last ice age makes climate change small by comparison. Let's not forget the 400ft of sea level rise. In fact if you look at the climate record the last ten thousand years, the current level of warming is lost in the noise. It will take centuries before it's enough to really jump out on the graph.
Life will adapt and carry on, climate change is possibly only a temporary blip for the earth itself. It may even turn out to be a good thing on long enough time scales, because it's been a little too chilly for comfort here the last few million years. Repeated cycles of ice ages are no joke. If you want to see how bad that can get, lookup snowball earth. Warming is no joke either, see Venus, but a little warming might not be the end of the world.
I'm Canadian, my county was buried under 2km of ice that scoured it to bedrock just as civilization was beginning elsewhere in the world. If you are in the US, you grow your food in what used to be Canadian soil. I'm more afraid of the cold than the heat. People from Australia and the middle east likely have the opposite view.
I think you mean east:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2018/10/17/tornado-al...
So arguably, change during the next ten years will look more like change during the last 50-100 years.
Now imagine the turmoil and political ramifications that could spring, even in the short term, from the flooding of Bangladesh and the migratiom of its people towards the global north.
Not sure what you're point is unless to say that this problem is on a long enough time horizon (where the survival rate for everyone drops to zero ...).
Small changes that we'll see well before the end of this century will have huge consequences. Don't be surprised if the country doesn't exist at all by the end of the century.
...or they live in an area whose fresh water supply depends on current weather patterns or glacier levels.
Even if they don't, the water shortages in such regions could lead to war, and I believe some such regions include nuclear powers. A nuclear war between, say, Pakistan and India over water allocation will probably have serious economic effects well outside just that region.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-l...
Your child, and your children's children will be fine.
Only 40% of conservative Republicans even believe climate change is happening (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/politics-...)
They will drive us all off this cliff and then expect us nerds to fix it. We should do something first.
Neither of those were coordinated global action that will make any difference. "Symbolic" agreements don't fix anything; they're just a way for politicians to punt the problem (if you think it's a problem) further down the road so they can stay in power. Not to mention that none of the countries that signed up for Kyoto came anywhere near meeting their targets (which were already too permissive to make a difference) anyway, and it looks like the same will be true of Paris. The US prefers not to sign agreements that we know we won't keep and that won't make a difference anyway; that's why we didn't ratify Kyoto and why Trump pulled us out of Paris.
The kind of draconian "coordinated global action" that would be necessary to actually stop CO2 emissions is not going to happen; nobody will accept that drastic a hit in standard of living. Not to mention that doing that would condemn all of the currently developing countries that have the most to lose to staying in poverty, which will make it so much harder for them to adapt. The best thing we can do is to create more wealth and bring more people out of poverty, and make our infrastructure more decentralized and robust. That will benefit everyone regardless of what kind of change comes.