Release of methane gas from the seafloor in the Southern Hemisphere
lnu.se
lnu.se
"Gas hydrate is an ice-like substance formed by water and methane at depths of several hundred metres at the bottom of our oceans at high pressure and low temperatures. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it is estimated that methane frozen in these sediments constitute the largest organic carbon reservoir on Earth. The fact that methane gas has now started leaking out through gas hydrate dissociation is not good news for the climate."
What I would really love to see is an indepedant website ranking all the threats. How bad is global shipping vs leaving your lights on? Or the clathrate gun vs burning oil fields? Or recycling your plastic vs throwing your plastic shit in the river in 3rd world countries?
Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%. Who's producing the rest? 'cause it's now obviously not most of the population of the world who get lectured about recycling, it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world.
While I agree very much about the absurd logic of trying to put the solutions to climate change on individuals, I am honestly perplexed that you don't seem to understand how all of your daily consumption contributes to climate change.
CO2 emissions doesn't just come from driving your car. If you ordered anything delivered from amazon that created CO2, if you live in a developing city your environment creates CO2, if you consume food that is grown non-locally or that uses fertilizer that also create CO2.
It's not just a "small number of companies" it's every company and every part of our modern life. Look around you and I can assure you that most of the things you see where shipped around the globe using ships powered by bunker fuel, they were made with materials gathered using a non-trivial amount of non-renewable energy.
Again, I agree that we can't expect that individually we'll all radically alter our lives and live like it's 1800, but it is essential to realize who much of your current way of live contributes to the enormous production of CO2.
The fact that things slowed down and we decreased emissions by some notable percentage but we suffered incredible economic consequences for this show just how unsustainable our entire way of life is.
I don’t think we need to regress back to living in mud clay huts and blocking Amazon orders.
We did need to stop burning coal for generating power 100 years ago.
[1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
We don't need to burn coal or oil anymore en masse.
People need to eat specifically meat like they need to burn specifically coal and oil.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
You can see there, that at least in the US (a major producer of beef) that there are much larger problems for us to solve before we focus on diet.
To be specific, it probably is a small number of companies but they are enablers, like specialist transport companies.
The global shipping industry is a major polluter relative to other industries, but shut that down hastily and all imported goods disappear.
And you don't need to be a hardline child-free bicycle riding vegan hippy to make a difference.
Reductions in all those things will make a difference. Have fewer children. Choose to own a more efficient car and choose to drive it less. Reduce your long distance and international travel. Eat more plant based food and less meat and dairy. Eat more locally sourced and seasonal food. And there are other lesser impact things too: live in a smaller and better insulated house. Prioritise efficiency higher - choose to buy more efficient appliances. Use low energy lighting. Choose to live near where you work/play/socialise. Choose lower carbon impact hobbies and recreation, perhaps a sailing boat instead of a ski boat? Perhaps athletic sports instead of Nascar?
At a bigger picture level. Vote for the planet, appropriately prioritise climate change policies in your voting choices (and with two party politics, this can be difficult to do, don't vote in a facist just because they're a treehugger, but try to also not vote in your own self-interest if that candidate is deeply in bed with the fossil fuel lobby). Focus your career towards ecologically sound companies/industries where you can - actively seek and choose jobs with climate change in mind, if you have a choice between two roles consider carefully before jumping to the slightly higher paid fossil fuel job. When making or contributing to decisions at work, ensure consideration for climate impact is brought up where appropriate.
And make a noise. Be publicly unsatisfied, even if you have no solutions. Let other people know you care, even if you can't see any real way to make a difference yourself.
I'd rather stop immigration before further driving our birth rates down and leaving world of the future to the low intelligence populations that are currently driving population growth on a global scale. The only ones following this "don't have children because of the climate" advice are those intelligent enough to do so. The whole thing is completely dysgenic in its nature.
The world isn't black and white.
Having more children than we need is why we're in this whole mess to begin with. If people stuck to having 2-3 kids instead of 4-5, we'd have a much longer runway to transition to renewables, including building up storage capacity.
Instead, we're scrambling and calling transitioning from coal to natural gas a success, when it's just changing 1 fossil fuel for another, while the world is burning (quite literally, in some parts) around us.
But I care deeply about the mess we’re leaving for my nieces and nephew, and for many of my friend’s children.
And, quite frankly, saying “not fucking up a planet is a meaningless exercise” if it doesn’t happen to allow _your_ precious DNA to survive? That’s not the sort of awful person I’d admit to being in public...
As choices left to the individual? Not likely. Only systemic/legal changes would have any impact...
Sea Shepherd, for example, are crazy far-end-of-the-bell-curve outliers. In my mind they're one of the ecological equivalents of RMS. Actions and choices that go way beyond what most people would consider sensible or necessary, but who're critically important for the movements they represent, because the "other side" has much worse and many more outliers in the "wrong direction". Without the work RMS has done over decades and the example he's set - flawed as he is - we could not have open source in the position it is today.
Sea Shepherd lobbing jars putrecene onto the decks of Japanese whaling "research" ships in the middle of the ocean is insane. But seeing suburban moms wearing Sea Shepherd tshirts in shopping malls and parks and political protests has without doubt made political candidates think differently.
So it's not hypocrisy, it's basic economics
More biking in the city, health improves, less water/electricity consumption, bills are reduced, less meat, no overweight issues.
You have quite a strong positive coupling/link between paying attention to the nature and yourself.
My basic economics is that my bank account tells me it is good.
It's okay for the small minority of motivated people to forgo enjoyment in pursuit of this ideal, but just don't be mistaken into believing that it will have a measurable effect.
The only real solution is to make natural human behaviour non-CO2-emitting.
You can have a still vastly bigger effect by affecting the footprint of others.
Re GP context, even with a low income you might get a lot done in activism / community organising, it might also make you feel more fulfilled as you are fighting to save the planet.
Living in a small and well-insulated flat should also make a sizeable impact.
Put a little money in your car, if you can. Keep it running well, it'll use less gas. Making a new car makes a ton of carbon. Getting every last mile out of what you got helps everyone.
Look for stuff that will last forever. A good set of boots you oil will last a long, long time. You can get them resoled. Iron skillets are super cheap and will outlast you. The stupid handle will fall off of a cheap skillet.
The number one thing is make the most of what you got. Stuff wears out. Next time around, look for stuff that'll last longer. Look for second hand stuff that can be repaired. there's a lot of great old tools out there that'll give years of service.
(this is basically just the first two parts of reduce, reuse, and recycle. the first two have the biggest impact.)
I don't think my efforts have made any measurable impact on the climate, but I always want to make sure I'm not missing a step.
I think it's beginning to become clear that consumers cannot suffer climate change away and change must be forced upon the worst offenders first. Not taking responsibility off of myself, but recognizing that, despite my votes against Congress members that support, the military industrial complex, is still one of the worst polluters globally.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
The "worst offenders" are rich and powerful, and will argue very effectively and brutally to congress that they should be allowed to continue to get richer and more powerful. That's the nature of power. That's a political problem and needs political solutions.
But...
Their arguments are _so_ much more powerful when they can look at the congress members and say "No one cares anyway! Look at all the voters buying SUVs instead of hybrids or electrics! Look at them all flying to Vegas and Paris and Bankok every year! Look at them not installing solar power. They! Dont! Care! The VOTERS don't care!!! (Oh, and speaking of flying to Paris, here's 4 first class tickets, enjoy...)"
I want to highlight durability and repairability over disposability. I wasn't super explicit about it, so let me say it now. Cheap disposable shit sucks. Costs a lot to make, but it's cheaper than something that's durable, resealable, repairable. I think that there is a huge part of the problem. As a concrete example, my grandma had the same tv for like 40 years, and the cabinet wound up turning into something else for one of my cousins. I'm looking at a big TV, and I'm not super sure I'll be able to plug it into anything in 10 years, if it even still works. I like it, I don't regret my choice, but I really didn't have the option for a full spectrum cost/benefit. They just don't make things like that that will probably work in 50 years.
2) I'm not sure what you mean about consumers suffering climate change. Here's another (perhaps silly example) I got an original iPhone. I'd still use that if it was feasible. I mean, I've got it in a drawer, I could probably figure it out, but the whole system avoids any longevity or resale value. I think it wouldn't take too much effort to shift just a little bit to longevity. I have a fancy pants phone, it's stupid. I didn't have a choice about getting a new phone cause the old one broke. The old one shouldn't have broken, it should have been a lot easier to find someone's hand me down. Right now that's like taking some rando from craigslist cash. ugh.
3) I have complicated thoughts about the military. I absolutely believe the US military is one of the worst offenders. The US military was also one of the first to integrate with respect to race, and later with respect to gender.
I think you've identified a real opportunity, that's a place that could absolutely lead the way. Finding the political will do actually do something is pretty tough. all the old arguments will come out - this endangers the safety of the nation.
-- final edit -- This is tasteless, I'll honor it. Was perhaps trying to appear committed, but it's more of an arrogant ass thing to close with. --
Tell you what though, if you think you can fix it, I'll donate $100 to your campaign, or charity. my username at gmail. ping me and I'll honor my claim.
-- terms and conditions edit -- it's gotta be you. not, of your choice. You. I might also need a link to this to remember how silly I am from time to time.
2. What I mean is this. Consumers cannot shop and boycott their way out of climate change. Reusable grocery bags/straws may give the consumer a hit of dopamine but these actions amount to little more than virtue signaling in terms of the effect they have on the environment. When no company offers a compromise free environmentally friendly durable and repairable alternative in any category consumers are trapped. This is the case with most products, and is why consumers cannot sacrifice (money, time, convenience) their way out of climate change.
3. Okay? Back to square one. That's the same sort of rhetoric we get about shuttering coal mines.
4. If I think of a way to solve global warming for $100 I'll definitely call on you to pay up.
I will not pay more taxes indirectly for feelings
It’s ok for previous generations to pay for the roads that allow you to travel and sell your wares or skills but a tax on your pollution to stave off mass re-settling of people in your lifetime would violate your sensibilities.
Many of the most fuel efficient vehicles are relatively cheaper than the less fuel efficient ones. For example, luxury sedans and sports cars tend to be less efficient than economy sedans, but economy sedans are (perhaps obviously from the name) cheaper. So by doing the environmentally efficient thing, you would actually be saving money, not spending more.
I don't see any question mark, nor any question.
(yes, I can accept I am wrong) :)
No hard feelings!
It is an interesting point about equality given that the problem really does originate from the richer parts of the world. A subsistence farmer in Africa is going to have a carbon footprint several orders of magnitude smaller than the typical SV inhabitant.
Even now poorer countries are arguing that they should be able to increase their emissions because they haven't created the problem. At the same time politicians in the richer part of the world are terrified of falling living standards. Because of this I doubt we can fix it in time but if we did it would probably look somewhat socialistic.
Contact your local representivies.
Encourage others.
But ultimately, we are all tied in this together. It might be a weird irony that many of the same people on HN who are concerned about climate change work for companies that look to optimize consumption. Not pointing fingers, just saying... we probably need serious government interference to hey things under control. But nobody (including me) wants that.
We should allocate tax money to field an army of Federal Inspectors. I'm sure this already exists somewhat on a smaller scale for EPA audits (though the EPA has been recently stripped of many resources and responsibility by the current administration).
It may not be necessary to give an Inspector the power to levy fines, because his/her purpose would be to discreetly patrol different cities talking to people about how they live their lives, while observing behavior and local conditions. This would create accountability and be a more personal way to collect data about public sentiment.
It could also create ripples in local conversation - "I talked to a G-woman today! She walked by while I was watering the garden and asked how my day was going and asked what I had for lunch - she says she's reducing meat consumption even though she loves the taste. I told her that I've been trying to sort my trash and she said 'keep up the good work'!. She was a very nice, pretty lady!"
We do not want to impose "enforcement" as much as we want to develop a polite, cordial federal presence (in the flesh) that sets a good example in order to sculpt citizen habits throughout the nation. It is the presence of authority without the fear of enforcement. It also sets a precedent ("wow, they are serious about this!").
A very recent "example" on front page Reddit today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BINH6NgnHTM
I'm not sure if this has happened before, but I believe it is an example of things to come. Public health is a security issue - I can understand Australian law enforcement responding [in the flesh] to local social media activity (anti-lockdown protest organization attempt). However, in the video it seems they are there to enforce, with a house warrant and handcuffs. A slap on the wrist can steer a citizen in the proper direction, but it can also generate resentment. I wouldn't want an "EPA Accountability Agent" to ever be resented. We would want them to exist as a strong, caring, curious, and relatable presence.
We need this kind of accountability now that the internet has ironically divided many people on some fundamentals. There's so much information out there and not enough naturally instilled intuition as to what is worth paying attention to.
Love your username, by the way. Long-term one day I'd like to be the warden of a piece of land and set up a such a diverse permaculture that eventually when I'm hungry, I would just go out to "gather" what I need fresh off the stalk.
This goes for positive or negative actions. It only takes a small fraction of people littering to make somewhere nice into a trash heap. They say eating less beef is good for the environment but that doesn’t mean you have to become a vegetarian immediately. If you eat 1/3 less meat, that could be just by skipping meat in a meal or two each week or eating slightly smaller portions, there’s likely many people like you. Not everyone can or will become vegetarian but by making the change to eat a bit less meat all every three people like you are creating a vegetarian equivalent.
One big change is realizing that while everyone is unique, countless people will be making similar decisions at any given moment.
> A household’s carbon footprint generally increases with its income, ranging from 19.3 to 91.5 tons of CO2-equivalent annually. [1]
> It is estimated that forests absorb between 10 and 20 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare each year. [2]
Reforestation costs about $1500/hectare [3], substantial but it is a lifetime investment.
[1] https://theconversation.com/5-charts-show-how-your-household...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=reforestation+cost+per+hecta...
But it is not true that the precautionary principle applies here regardless of the risk.
There is a cost to avoiding the behaviors that raise the possibility of run away methane release; carbon based energy was absolutely necessary to get out science/industry to the point we can look for alternatives.
If we muddled around in the pre-industrial age in perpetuity, eventually we'd get wiped out by some large event (astroid, super volcano, ice age etc). So the risk is worth it to a point since the cost of the alternative is equally high.
But even so, that argument is flawed: we're still at risk of getting wiped out by all the same extreme natural phenomena as we were 500 years ago, only we've added some new ones of our own: nuclear holocaust, clathrate guns, runaway warming of some other cause immediately spring to mind. Probabilistically we're worse off now than we were then, just because of the additional ways things can go wrong.
We don't have the choice to stay pre-industrial. That's off the table. We do hopefully still have the choice to avoid a scenario that drops us irrecoverably back to pre-agricultural.
Assuming that you're right about a small number of companies producing most of the pollution, and a small proportion of people "hoarding wealth" what does the one have to do with another? If all the oil and coal companies had stock that was distributed perfectly evenly, I don't see how it would necessarily change pollution.
Do you think the rich just buy coal mines and set them on fire?
Or do you mean all the citizens of Europeans and North American, in which case yes. We 1% with all the wealth are the ones emitting CO2 while we wait for the worlds poor to catch up, who get to have a small footprint by letting kids die of diarrhoea and stuff.
You stared well, of course the Clathrate gun is made up like almost everything else in the global warming lore, but then you started your own fan fiction.
But I really believe the world is going to be different in 10 years from now. And it is very likely a lot of people must migrate to other places because conditions become unlivable.
You might become a foreigner yourself one day.
I wonder how far away in the future is the point where the methane would actually raise quicker than bacteria are able to process it.
The Swarm by Schätzing depicted a scenario like this, concluding in the runaway being fast enough to eventually cause the clathrate to detonate, causing a large scale tsunami in the north sea of Europe.
Like The Day After Tomorrow but without the comforting thought reminding you that couldn't actually happen.
The IPCC reports account for a lot of things but for political reasons have been conservative in many of their estimates because certain countries are not fond of the implications of our sustainable lifestyle.
It is hard to imagine where you live [1], somewhere in Africa? And these "certain countries" evangelize consumerism?
Or is it a typo in "our unsustainable lifestyle"? Can't understand it either. Negative change in CO₂ emissions is a rare event [2].
Even entire world 0 tonnes per capita emissions today will result in 1.5°C warming [1].
How about 2°C [2]? Maybe with 0.1 tonnes per capita, 0.78 Gtonne worldwide. That's [3]
Democratic Republic of Congo 0.02 t
Somalia 0.05 t
Burundi 0.05 t
Central African Republic 0.06 t
Chad 0.07 t
Malawi 0.08 t
Rwanda 0.09 t
Niger 0.10 t
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-2c
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
No it isn't, it's around (under, really) 10%. CO2 from US transportation alone is 6.7 billion tonnes, vs 4.8 for all tropical deforestation (which is the place land use for livestock takes place). It is a common misconception that land use or agriculture are significant drivers of climate change. They are of course tremendously damaging in their own particular ways (eg water/runoff/biodiversity), but globally energy, and fairly close behind it transportation, are by far the largest causes of increased greenhouse gas emissions.
The way this works is, we run a computer model and try to come up with a scenario which matches the observations from that time period the best. And seems like the extreme warning that happened during the PETM was likely due to methane hydrate dissociation. I can link a few scientific papers if anyone is interested.
Edit : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Max...
This is a good write-up. I'd still appreciate big picture commentary from domain experts, though.
This is my PhD adviser's paper. It is best to date estimate on the rate of carbon emissions during the PETM: https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_file...
It was really warm, not sure on the exact number off the top of my head but at least 10-15 degrees C warmer in high latitudes than today. It was essentially an ice free world. And during the PETM event itself, the temperatures rose another 5 to 8 degrees C: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/385777/Ex...
The emissions from grains etc add up to roughly as much overall- you don't eat the entire plant and it either rots or gets fed to cows. Obviously reducing emissions in our food industry is a huge win- eliminating red meat would be awesome. It's nowhere near good enough. Fossil fuels are 30x more important, easily.
But I can't see any fundamental reason that such side effects should add to the warming. It seems just as likely that they would counteract it. It's not like there is any plan behind it. In Physics, whatever happens happens.
So... I wonder if there is also a set of counteracting global warming side effects that don't get reported much, since that isn't scary? Or is there some fundamental reinforcement mechanism here that I'm not seeing?
To my knowledge the reinforcement mechanisms we are aware of do tend to be positive, though, hence the focus on warming.
The fact it is released does not mean that it is captured (by humans). Actually, any project to capture all of methane clathrate (because capturing all of it is the only way to preventing it melting and leaking) would be so titanic, really impossible, or very very difficult.
Yes we agree, Musk will never run out of methane. But the Earth will quickly run out of capacity to process it when it's released, accelerating the greenhouse effect, that's the real limiting factor.
Microorganisms could very well be useful, but only if the process stays slow. But in this case, maybe there are already enough of them naturally.
Still being broken down into CO2, but still not as bad as being released directly into the atmosphere as CH4.
Yes ocean fertilization is a very underrated geoengineering tool for carbon capture and storage, that should be really looked into.
I think an efficient delivery mechanism could be to demand that plastics slowly release iron when submerged for a longer time.
With any luck that'd clean up the plastic belt also.
Another mechanism would be to have ships and planes emit iron when they travel over these areas
Micro-plastics are plentiful in the oceans in particular because they degrade very slowly, whereas we want algal bloom to quickly devour the iron, so that would not match.
I appreciate the funny idea though! ^^ To turn these calamities into features!
The slow degradation of plastics is actually a feature in that sense, as a single piece of plastic will fertilize a larger area of the ocean.
It may also lead to algae growing on the plastic and then dying, leading it to sink and no longer represent a threat to wildlife.
At about 800ppm there are measurable falls in human cognitive performance. Might not happen outside for a while, but the increase to the outdoor level makes ventilation much more difficult.