“Abrupt thaw” of Arctic permafrost releasing more CO2 than predicted

I totally agree wildfires are getting worse because of climate change.

But... I was asked about the far larger and far worse fires Australia had in 1974-1975, and why those were related just to mismanagement and these are related to climate change. I didn't have an answer, does anyone?

I think 4-5C is a pretty reasonable assumption, over the next century.

The thing is that most of our current action plan for climate change consists of reducing CO2 emissions, and this is woefully inadequate for a world that the most recent science indicates has already passed the tipping point. Among the second-order changes that we should be preparing for:

1. Migration as the new norm. A 4-5C temperature rise will shift equivalent biomes over 1000 miles northward/southward, and inundate large coastal areas where major populations are currently located. Major densely-populated areas will become uninhabitable, and currently uninhabitable areas will become fertile.

2. The collapse of governments, and of the nation-state system. When migration becomes the new norm, borders become irrelevant, as do settled homogenous populations. What's the new political organization look like?

3. Large temporary food shortages. Higher temperatures, higher rainfall, and higher CO2 levels actually mean that in the long-term, plant growth and agricultural productivity will increase, and the earth's carrying capacity should go up. But in the short term - a lot of our current crops are hyper-specialized to their existing climate, and land rights, water rights, & physical crop location become problematic. Food distribution becomes critical - we'll likely make enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but the people who grow it may not want to share (or may have the inability to trade) with the people who need it.

4. Expect to see more diseases emerge. Large migrations, changes in biomes, and increased human habitation of formerly virgin ecosystems all spell chances for pathogens to jump from animal hosts to people and spread widely.

Overall, I'm a lot more scared of the likelihood that humans will kill each other than that the environment will kill us. We have a unique tendency to blame each other for unwelcome changes rather than to adapt to them.

> living in a 4-5C world

It would be close to impossible to feed 8B people in a +4C world. Probably even in a +2C world.

Enjoy the party while it lasts.

I am also concerned so I reoriented my career to support environmental advocacy. Forget sorting your recyclables. Go make a career in alternative energy, alternative transportation, geoengineering or environmental advocacy. I guarantee you will be able to do more for this issue than tweeting or donating online. I have saved my organization more in infrastructure costs than I will ever earn in my lifetime.

The paperclip maximizers are here and they will turn the entire surface of the earth into plastic wrap and data centers. Choose to dedicate the productive capacity of your life to something else.

IIRC that project was ultimately a failure. The plankton didn't sink to the bottom as expected, instead they were eaten by fish and failed to sequester much carbon.

Because absent a near halt on CO2 emissions they are worthless. We will keep emitting past the point where they are useful and will have a much steeper cliff to fall off. If you have ever seen Futurama's "Crime of the Hot", think of dropping the increasingly large ice cube as the analogy.

If we solve emissions, then I think everyone agrees we can look at accelerated weathering and other sequestration strategies.

There's also the option to spray sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, similar to volcanic eruptions. I think the main problem is that the effects are hard to predict, so you really only want to do it as a last resort.

If we fail to restrict our release of greenhouse gases and CO2 sequestration doesn't get economical and funded in a sensible way, our best option is probably solar shades in low earth orbit (giant sheets of ultra thin foil). It's more expensive than dumping iron in the oceans or sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, but it's predictable and easy to undo.

I wonder why we’re still in emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases now instead of trying to fix the problem later.

40% of the worlds electricity is generated using coal.

If we changed this 10 years ago, we’d have less problems today.

If we change this today we’ll have less of a problem in 10 years.

We’re coming up with all kinds of clever ideas to deal with the problem in 2050. This is a slow train wreck happening over decades.

Environmentalists are against technical solutions to climate change because people wouldn't learn anything. They need to experience the effects of their actions so they learn from it. Otherwise they'd just expect technology to save them every time they cause a disaster.

Mostly it's a question about cost, really.

Arguably, we should rule out solar radiation management - in the models you get the weirdest side effects, for example if you ramp up amount of stratospheric sulfur aerosol to the maximum effect (which doesn't even cover all of the warming we have already committed to btw), the jetstream collapses. Do you want to be the one to run that test for real? Also, they only combat a part of the problem, eg sea acidification is untouched. (Still, there is coffee talk about a sulfur test from the US soon.. the person they have in mind doesn't seem too stoked though. Not sure what the state is.)

Carbon sequestration appears feasible. Options include increased biomass (limited effect and needs protection forever), direct removal (how to store safely and longterm?) and enhanced weathering. All of those cost more per ton of carbon in both energy and price compared to not burning fossil fuels. Techniques don't really exist yet to be deployed at scale either, plus the energy needs to come from somewhere.

However, if you have a look at the 1.5°C IPCC report, all the pathways given there assume some kind of carbon capture. The most optimistic one just needs trees, the business-as-usual one needs a massive effort of capturing about half of our yearly emissions starting in 10 years. (!) [0]

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...

edit: By the way, we have enough fossil fuels in the ground to reach 5000 ppm of CO2. At 1000 ppm humans already have measurable cognitive decline.

iron seeding can increase amount of cyanobacteria which recently have been identified as potentially being methanogenic, thus this might not be a good idea. Unintended side effects of most geoengineering solutions are a big problem - some things like marine cloud brightening might be a bit less risky though. The other big issue is that most of those measures are just a bandaid which offsets a fixed amount of CO2, so it counter acts a few years of emissions but then you can't scale it up anymore. Adding Sulfur to the atmosphere for example can have a cooling effect but alongside other bad effects like acid rain, there are also studies showing that after a certain amount of sulfur, it does not provide a lot of negative forcing anymore.

Feels a bit like logging into the production server to edit the code there. Maybe it'll come to that, but... might be nice to address some of the root cause issues.

Because we've already conducted one grand experiment with planet-scale climate modification, inadvertently. You'd have to have a very high degree of confidence that the "cure" won't make things a lot worse.

And that's without even getting into the question of who'll pay for it. The countries most affected by climate change - tropical, developing - are least able to pay for it.

Iron seeding was tried--not a good idea.

Yes, it had the predicted effects in terms of plankton growth and the rest of the food chain. It did take a lot of CO2 out of the air. However, some of the animal life fell into the deep ocean and slowly decayed--releasing methane. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Lots of fish but no climate benefit.

I think humanity can handle (adapt to) the combo of forests burning, ocean acidification, and thawing tundra. At great cost, measured in lives, gold, and lost opportunities, of course.

Until recently I considered the "clathrate gun" to be an extermination event. The earth hasn't had those level of CO2 and methane (in the air) since the Eocene (~2000 CO2 ppm). It's hard to imagine industry and agriculture functioning in that context.

But perhaps humans are more resilient. There's growing evidence validating the Young Dryas theory, where the global temps plunged and then spiked 1000 years later. Somehow humans survived, even though our fledgeling civilization was reset.

We'll all die. It's not so terrifying as depressing. Clathrate gun means death for essentially everyone. Maybe Bezos and Musk are right to make off planet life temporarily viable. Modern society is based on relatively predictable large scale agriculture being able to redistribute goods (transportation infra, tech to support distribution). We simply, as a society, are not capable of adapting to those circumstances. Most humans would die and the survivors would not enjoy a modern lifestyle.

The change needs to be systemic, which is the problem. Logistics, industry and agriculture make up the vast majority of emissions. But for these things to change prices will have to rise probably quite dramatically.

We’ve gotten so used to not paying for the externalities associated with emissions it’s damn near impossible to shift gears. Even at the individual level people are often only willing to do it when the cost increase is marginal.

If we taxed emissions at every level things would get so expensive people would riot.

I think we just have to accept that our society is not designed in a way that we can deal with this. We will have to let the catastrophe happen before there will be any real change. Even then their may not be change. We just have to wait for enough people to die for the system to fall back into balance.

Climate scientists have long feared being called alarmist, and indeed - the preliminary evidence is that this may have led to over-conservative estimates of the impacts and timescale of the climate disaster.

It is because the flow of money that powers climate research, green industry, and climate activism is largely dependent on stirring up fear in the public to garner acceptance and support. Climate change is a real problem but so are the perverse incentives in our research institutions.

In the 1970s, they used to show us films in school about how the world was going to run out of fresh water in ten years. It's a message I still remember.

This might help contain temperature changes, but it won't prevent ocean acidification due to rising CO2 levels. I'm curious what percent of the damage is done by CO2 levels vs directly by temperature.

The earth is kinda big. The sun strikes over 49,000,000 square miles at any given moment. A solid surface shade blocking 1% would need to be nearly half a million square miles if we could hold it in place like at lagrange 1. If we could launch a fuel that burns into a gas that can effectively block/reflect light that reduces the mass to about 250 sq. miles of fuel times whatever is the necessary density of the gas cloud.

Even if it was actually feasible to regulate how much sun the Earth gets you'd have to consider these points:

1) Climate lag. There are some 40 years of lag between emissions and changes to the climate. Even if stopped all human emissions today temperatures would keep rising for 40 years.

2) Climate feedbacks. There are a number of systems (methane, arctic ice, etc) that will keep altering the climate even if we stopped all emissions today.

The next 100 or so years are going to be rough no matter what humanity does.

If you run the numbers you'll see that this is not a viable option. It's too expensive to get enough payload in space, the earth can't afford it.

I mean if you're making mirrors, why do we need to put them in space at great cost? Just put them on earth. The cost of the actual mirrors is basically zero compared to to the cost of putting that mirror in orbit. The earth mirrors might be slightly less efficient but you can just make up for that with more mirrors.