Global Green Up Slows Warming
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
The surge in plant growth is a result of increased amount of CO2 in the air as a result of anthropogenic activity. Quirky systems we have on the planet.
Other key piece of the pie - we need to reduce CO2e emissions to ensure habitability of the planet. I.e. our effects >> global greening effects.
You are correct. This has been known already 24 years ago:
Couple of questions because I'm curious...
What percentage of the 0.04% CO2 in Earth's atmosphere do humans contribute?
Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth?
Edit: for those struggling with the irony, my comment is pro-questions and pro-heresy. Let's not attack people for asking questions
What if it's only 99.99% sure that CO2 is the reason for climate change? What about 90%? No need to act until we bring that up to 100%?
What's with the fixation on 0.04% as a number? Things can't have huge impact unless numbers are also big? I don't want to offend, but that's honestly third grade mentality.
There's surprise about small things having little impact, and then there's denial hidden as feigned curiosity. Especially when the answers are directly available from much more credible sources than random internet posters.
Compare with:
"Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that the lead comprising 0.03% [hypothetically - for reference, this is 100000x the FDA limit] of our food intake is the main culprit/control knob which controls brain development?"
No, it actually isn't the "main" control knob. And our bodies are also complex with many feedback loops. And no study will ever reach p = 0. And it's a really small number. And yet we have made "extremely huge decisions" regarding what fuels we allow, what tests food have to undergo etc...
This is a loaded question ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question ), since it implies that this question-asking is honest and straightforward.
On the contrary, it seems like OP is "jaqing off" ( https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions ); unless, of course, they can absolutely prove 100% that they're acting in good faith.
In contrast, OP's hunch about the climate emergency either not existing because the concentration of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is "small" (according to some unspecified criteria), and/or fixing itself due to plant growth, run counter to the consensus position of the world scientific community, and hence the burden of proof is on OP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
It was their choice to raise that burden to the unachievable height of '100% absolute proof' :)
I'm really just asking an honest question, and it's always healthy to revisit the evidence especially when you're making a big claim like "sand does maths".
Has it been proven that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main factor which affects Earth's climate(s)?
I'm asking, because 0.04% of something seems like a particularly small fraction to have such a dramatic effect on a whole planet's weather and climate. Especially in a non-linear dynamic and chaotic - hence very difficult to predict - system like Earth's weather and climate system.
In my opinion it is important to ask these questions because some extremely huge decisions ride on them.
Now, we could potentially make many more clouds. For instance, container ships could be required to have fuel additives or “salt lofters”that promote cloud seeding and marine cloud brightening.
Regarding the greenhouse effect of water vapor, I don't know whether what matters is the average relative humidity or the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. For our sake I hope it's the former.
The effect of CO2 on the climate is old science, it goes back to the 19th century, it seems a little bit insincere to ask this kind of question, if you had actual interest you would have found the answer very easily already.
If you have doubts about the scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect, study up on that. But continually bringing up that 0.04% makes it sound like you are clinging to that fact as a "gotcha" and avoiding learning anything more.
After having spent decades debating "climate change deniers", I came to to the realization that the greenhouse effect as thought in schools is vastly oversimplified, and essentially no lay person understands it.
This is not to say that climate change isn't real, but most people don't have the technical background to educate each other, and attempt to do so based on inaccurate models.
Having read hundreds of articles, I still don't understand how to reconcile the greenhouse model with the fact that infrared radiation only travels ~10m in the atmosphere in the bandwidth absorbed by CO2.
It's because it's a highly non-linear and chaotic system.
If earth's climate was a linear system, then indeed your gut feeling that 0.04% change is small would be warranted.
This is such a dubious statement you keep repeating. Is it the main one? No, probably not. If you took out all the Nitrogen, shit would break a lot faster than if you took out all the CO2. You could probably name a few others.
However it is proven that carbon emissions is the main thing affecting the the change we are observing in earth's climate. And I shouldn't have to, because you are who you are, I'm going to staple on "within reasonable amount of certainty"
Yes and no. It has been proven (for more than 200 years) that CO2 increases heat retention, even when present in small amounts.
It has also been proven that CO2 is not the only one doing that (methane has an effect even far greater than CO2, for the same amount).
2) 100% of what?
Could you share some scientific facts that you believe to be 100% proven?
Would help to determine what your yard stick is here...
Since CO2 ppm nearly doubled since pre-industrial times then humans are responsible for nearly half of the CO2 in the atmosphere.
> Has it yet been absolutely proven 100% that a gas comprising 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere is the main culprit/control knob which controls climate(s) around the Earth?
Yes, for reasonable definitions of "proven 100%".
And Science doesn't work by "Absolutely 100% proving" anything. Bayesian statistics which underpins almost all of modern science lets us take highly educated guesses with communicable confidence in that guess. So stop looking for "100% absolute proof" to be convinced, you won't get it.
Aside from the hyperbole, pretty much yeah.
Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't important when considering the greenhouse effect since they're diatomic molecules with tighter absorption bands and don't have the broad bands in the IR so that 99.96% of the atmosphere just doesn't matter (Argon is monoatomic which is even more dismissable. H2O matters but gas-vs-droplets is complicated and took decades to sort out).
It is all the rest of it that matters. And for example, satellite measurements of the absorption bands in the atmosphere show that CO2 absorption has been widening which explains the satellite observed reduction in IR emission from the Earth which explains warming as an imbalance in the heat budget of the entire planet.
The increase in CO2 coming from humans is also established via analysing the isotopes of carbon in the CO2 in the atmosphere and we can see that it is coming from carbon that we dig up out of the ground (protected from cosmic ray radiation) vs. the CO2 that was in the atmosphere. We can also measure that only about half the carbon we emit stays in the atmosphere, while the other half does get captured by the natural carbon cycle. But that's enough to disturb the balance. Small deviations in the budget add up over time.
And these questions are very, very basic. We wouldn't be discussing climate change if scientists didn't have the answers more or less nailed down.
More information and a massive amount of references can be found at skepticalscience.com
I'd also recommend Ruddiman's undergraduate text on climate:
https://www.amazon.com/William-F-Ruddiman-Earths-Climate/dp/...
Although for $287 for the paperback, maybe rip it off on libgen. I think back when I bought the first edition it was $80 which seemed steep. Fuck science publishers, seriously.
That's not quirky, it's why global warming is less of a risk than people care to admit. If CO2 is the primary cause of global warming then organisms that need / utilize CO2 will flourish. A byproduct of this is often oxygen, so it'll likely stabilize itself given enough time.
There's only so much CO2 organisms can absorb, and they all buffer it - not consume it. Meanwhile, we're still adding CO2 at an exponential rate.
Every exponential has a limit, and in the case of plants the old limit might the pre-industrial or possibly pre-agricultural equilibrium. How much can grow now depends on not just the atmospheric CO2, but also plants and animals we have selectively bread, the canals we’ve built, the the phosphate we’ve mined, the mountain tops we’ve removed to make mining easier, the glaciers we’ve melted, the storms whose frequency we’ve changed, the aquifers we’ve emptied, the lowlands which have become salty from the sea level rises, and almost certainly a lot more besides. (Edit: and if the zooplankton which human activities ultimately encourage produce waste which floats or sinks, the latter being a way to remove carbon from the system, the former puts it back in the air).
Some of that pushes the equilibrium up, some down.
Sure, life will adapt and overcome - over time. But evolution won't save us here, as we're altering the climate orders of magnitude faster than natural selection runs its OODA loop.
Is there more to this argument? Because it could well stabilize at "palm trees at the poles". Or it might never stabilize because of ever-increasing CO2 production (compared to sequestration).
"There could be an equilibrium" really isn't an argument imo.
So I'm curious based on what study you assume plants will flourish unlimited to compensate all additional CO2.
The IPCC report analysis increase risks with more CO2. Shouldn't the risk go down if plants would just compensate it?
And apparently the Amazonas as a whole org is now no longer consuming CO2 and is a net negative.
The consensus of climate scientists is wrong, everyone! The consensus of economists is wrong, everyone! We all just overlooked this one simple fact.
A few more plants will grow... and then we'll still see the ecological collapse that is the true fear. And those plants are going to de-acidify the ocean anytime soon.
For some things we have a process now that helps us discover truth about tangible things. But since we don't have a control planet, we abstract that problem to man-made oracles (i.e. black-box models), which is not much better than ancients who sacrificed to the rain gods--it might even be worse, because we think the models are accurate, whereas no one today would believe in rain gods.
Ah yes, the crippling terror that everything will be fine. How foolish we would appear, to have spent trillions on mitigation efforts, with nothing to show for it except sustainable jobs, technological research and development, cleaner air, quieter streets, reduced dependence on unsavoury oil-producing nations, less incentive to wage war in the middle east. What a catastrophe that would be...
Your certainty belies your arrogance. Nothing would make me happier than the doomsday predictions being wrong.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13695... [2] https://cfaes.osu.edu/news/articles/higher-carbon-dioxide-le...
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/green-saha...
The world regularly adjusts, California has had more fires historically (and less).
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/09/1112839109
I agree things are changing, but it's not clear who or what is causing it. That's really my only thoughts on the subject. Seems CO2 has a smaller impact than what ever has caused the Sahara to turn into a desert.
Is it also possible that plants can effectively slow down the heat transfer to permafrost, at least when that shade is sorely needed during atypical heat waves?
But these interactions are not very well know currently.
Measurements of warming in these models are controversial. How can they establish that 0,25 increase in the average temperature of the Earth has occurred? How does an average even makes sense, in such discrepancy in temperatures observed worldwide. How can models properly reflect the reality of 0.25c degrees, or whatever low predicted increase, will have on the planet?
Also, how do they account for urbanization effects (which in itself causes warming), and placement of thermometers around these areas.
I have more questions than certainties about this issue.
> Also, how do they account for urbanization effects (which in itself causes warming), and placement of thermometers around these areas.
Related to your worries, 11 years ago a group of physicists from outside the meteorology and climate science community, had similar worries. Maybe meteorologists and climate scientists haven't done a good analysis of the existing land surface temperature measurements? What about the urban heat island effect, growing cities, and moving measurement locations?
These physicists started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, went back to the original raw data, and reanalyzed everything, developing their own new statistical methods as needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth
The result? The same observed warming rate as in the previous studies.
Maybe this kind of reanalysis needs to be done again every 10-20 years? Kind of like rewriting software from scratch.
In particular, your questions about how the increase is measured are answered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_recor..., your questions about the impact of land use changes are answered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Changes_of_the_..., your question about how the models are calibrated to predict future effects is partly answered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change#Warm..., and your question about how it makes sense to measure a temperature as an average reveals that you don't know what a temperature is and is answered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature#Microscopic_statis....
You really need to rethink where you've been getting your information from and start practicing some minimal epistemic hygiene.
This is a win. It might counter the narrative for emissions control, but if also tells us that the medicine is in our system.
It's not "ironic" at all. It's only sad (maybe not for most of HN readership) that taxpayers are coerced into funding various government-led bullshit "research" - from climate to Covid-19 and more.
"Skeptic" circles mentioned this effect of CO2 1-2 decades ago, but it was ignored so that globalist-climatist agenda can continue.
There are plenty of feedback mechanisms, some positive, some negative. It is just one of many.
But one thing for sure, because it is just a negative feedback mechanism, it is not enough. It can only slow down atmospheric CO2 accumulation, not stop it, and if we become really good at carbon capture and manage to reverse our emissions, it will work against us.
Interesting to see an increasing number of climate change conspiracy theorists on Hacker News recently. Even more interesting to see COVID-19 conspiracy theorists too...
Professional bullshit peddlers can still peddle bullshit without any help from misinterpretable facts. However, if you lie/censor and are discovered, the facts will be on their side. Tiny upside, large downside -- I plug those numbers into my calculator and it makes a frowny face.
Next step is we turn world population into slaves to build a Mars rocket, and kill everyone who's not actively working on the Mars rocket.
Not sure if Global Warming will be enough to enslave world population, but we could also come up with new things like "Global Cooling" or maybe even engineer a new virus to keep the idiots scared.
As it is right now, if they're upfront with their research, they can preemptively address a lot of the potential BS that would follow.