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Comment by parksy | Hacker News Reader

In which case I would have to take a step back and think about the world for a bit. Is there a possibility when it gets warmer / more carbon rich, the carbon-hungry microbes go to town, reducing temperatures (*eventually, maybe not over time periods important to humans?)

If the world's microbiome is geared to maintaining (rather than merely existing in / responding to) temperatures and atmospheric gas ratios within a fine margin that would be noteworthy.

I've probably drunk too much and it's too late at night for this conversation to be honest. I probably shouldn't have even pressed "reply".

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The thing is there are hundreds of negative and positive feedbacks, and they’re all modeled by people whose job is to think of these things. You are not going to think of something novel unless you are an expert in a related field. Your curiosity is not a bad thing. As a climatologist I’ve heard so many versions of “climate models don’t account for X” where X has been modeled since the 1980s that it just kind of triggers me.

The error bars of the IPCC report are our best guess on what we think we know about uncertainty. Sure, we could end up outside of it, on some heretofore unknown feedback, but it’s like betting our collective future on a longshot horse. The same applies to the assuming it will be much worse.

I think I get what you're saying, and I think I agree - generally I defer to the advice of people who are experts in a field for that reason - it's your profession and what you do for a living. I'm a computer programmer / software architect with a side interest in chaos theory. While I understand models and algorithms so I get complex dynamical systems, my domain knowledge is decidedly NOT climate science - I spend more time pushing pixels at the end of the day.

Similar to the recent / ongoing pandemic, there's tons of variables and I've made a similar argument to people who decry in a mocking tone the "scientists" with their "agendas" etc... like dude these are people individually who devoted ten years of education and research MINIMUM learning about one specific thing.. BEFORE they were taken seriously enough to even get a job. Pushing pixels and shovelling dirt are both important and necessary, but when it comes to complex matters, listen to the person who made a lifetime commitment to studying that thing. I get it, and apologies if I somehow sounded like I was brushing that away. As you say, I'm just curious.

So anyway I'll take this all with a grain of salt. Seems interesting but as you imply it's a bit overhyped. It's just another small wheel within an intricate mechanism of gears and the overall swing of the machine is to hotter temperatures, more carbon dioxide, nothing changes, the overall trend is still clear. As I say, I was probably too drunk to hit reply, but I'm glad I did.

Thanks for the reply, it gave me a chance to pause and reflect.

Well, I used to do it for a living when I was a graduate student. Now I haul bits from the bit mines, like you. As I said before, it’s okay to be curious. It’s okay to be hopeful too. You have a pretty good attitude, which is why I bothered to reply. You learn to spot the closed minds.

But it is not okay to pin our hopes on the unknown — not in this case, when so much is already known. The hype is problematic; cherry-picking research that helps one’s argument is the political problem of climate science. There are plenty of negative feedbacks, and I knew professors who made their grant money by picking topics that made the climate crisis sound less crisisish. The research was good and so was the money, but their reputations suffered from being one-sided.

And that’s not to say scientific consensus can’t be profoundly wrong. The amyloid plaque hypothesis, for one. Geology accepted continental drift, essentially its central dogma, less than a hundred years ago, after much wringing of hands. But climate models have verified predictions. And climate is such a vast problem that “a related field” I mentioned earlier is essentially all of the Earth sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences to some degree, because the Earth-atmosphere-hydrosphere system is vast. But that means we also have millions of eyes looking for bugs and corner cases.

This is a good question! And it’s clear youre not asking this in bad faith (the line of thinking that CO2 is good for humanity & the planet is a common climate misinformation tactic)

I’m not an expert on this stuff but from what I’ve read over the course of millennium. The Earth will achieve balance again (assuming no further human intervention)

For all practical reasons that won’t work for us. Using microbes as a carbon removal solution is a real potential solution! Specifically using microbes in place of fertilizers as a technique to improve soil health (which would increase soil organic carbon). Although it’s not 100% clear how well that carbon will be stored for the long term.

I’m oversimplifying the science no doubt but we can harness microbes to our benefit.

No for sure I'm strongly of the mind that greenhouse gases do their job in creating a greenhouse, which increases temperature over time (which means more energy in the global system, which means everything from stronger storms to longer droughts...)

As a layperson I've read about the Vostok cores and understand how closely correlated CO2 concentrations and dust are as proxies for global temperature. Also I've read up on how phytoplankton essentially are the reason we have oxygen to breathe, so there are risks like ocean acidification that could kill us all regardless of temperature.

If some of those little buggers can give us an out or at least give us a longer grace period to sort our stuff out, I want in.

(edit: but I almost forgot - it would be mindblowing if it turned out the Earth was somehow tuned to bring itself back to some average. The millions of different chemical combinations and seasonal variations all mediated by the ecosystem - which seems rather fragile but what if it was brutally rigid. I guess it's had a couple of billion years to gear itself up?)

It basically already is tuned to maintain an average, just as a buffer solution can oppose changes in pH. It maintains a temperature level above what we'd otherwise expect, and our unnatural oxygen atmosphere.

If we do nothing, it is unlikely to run away, but it will take rather longer than a human timescale to put it back to a comfortable level, and there could be a lot of damage over the next century.

Anything that needs carbon in its metabolism will, naturally, use what's available.

Biological systems are tricky, though. If you dump a huge amount of fruit into a forest, the animals will eat it and grow in number; then, so will their predators. Animals who don't eat the fruit but are eaten by the predators will be in a bad spot. That leads to consequences all over the food web. Plus, dumping large amounts every year also changes the soil chemistry and changes what grows there.

Similarly, higher CO2 decreases water pH (more acidic) and can cause fast-growing algae to bloom (which decreases light penetration to the water beneath, and the algae may produce toxins).

Even when high-level equilibria are reached (which they eventually would, one way or another), they won't necessarily be the same or come pleasantly.

It’s 100% clear that carbon doesn’t persist in the soil. It’s make believe unsupported by any evidence

No that’s just not true. Carbon does persist in soil. For how long is a very different question.

Once Soil Organic Carbon is converted to Microbial Organic Matter it is much more robust.

But the threats that climate change bring also threaten the stability of land ecosystems (drought, increased forest fires, etc) which will release the carbon stored in the soil.

So we shouldn’t rely on soil alone to sequester carbon(nor should it make up the bulk of our sequestration portfolio), but to claim it doesn’t persist in soil is a false statement.

Sorry you're just wrong or focussing on a topic not the one at hand. Of course SOC is good for soil health. But for sequestration over any meaningful time frame you need to go below plow depth.

For further reading the best long term study of which I am aware on SOC via cover cropping (and that's all that we are interested in here is long-term) over 19 years found actual losses of carbon not gains at the soil depths that are important. [0]

... If we only measured soil C in the top 30 cm, we would have assumed an increase in total soil C increased with WCC alone, whereas in reality significant losses in SOC occurred when considering the 2 m soil profile. Ignoring the subsoil carbon dynamics in deeper layers of soil fails to recognize potential opportunities for soil C sequestration, and may lead to false conclusions about the impact of management practices on C sequestration....

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14762

You have touched on the property about systems that people don't really internalize well. When you're inside and part of a system and perturb it, the impact of the perturbation may activate parts of the system that you were unaware existed.

But it is also true that if you say, "Climate change is really only a big deal for the currently dominant flora and fauna, the planet as an ecosystem has been in many different states from ice ball to volcanic hell hole." :-) In geologic time it doesn't "matter" at all.

It is a good paper, and I've added it to the list of things that are changing that may influence climate changes (another is what happens with cloud formation when we have more moisture in the air due to rising atmospheric average temperatures, the IPCC model gives one result if we get more stratospheric clouds, and another if we get more clouds in the troposphere.)

Good question. I think at the very least it shows that in a highly complex systems with many components unknown to us it is very difficult to predict the future. We shouldn’t stop trying though and update our models accordingly.

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