‘Something weird is going on’: Antarctic sea ice stays at historic lows

> in about 20 to 50 years

That's the optimistic timeline :)

I've read somewhere that up to half of Antarctic sea ice could easily disappear in hours or days, given right conditions. Greenland is not looking good either.

https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/coming-soon

When Greenland melts completely global sea levels will rise about 20 feet, or 7 meters.

We aren’t talking about “if” anymore. We are way past that. Now, we are discussing “how fast”.

It could happen much faster than we used to think.

With “Global Warming” temperature is only half of the equation. The other half is speed. With Global Warming, the faster it happens, the worse it is.

Very funny clip on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYp6oc37ds

If we aren’t able to predict it then we need to assume the worst. Start moving inland/to higher areas now. I’m not optimistic though. I don’t understand why people (with the means) continue to live and rebuild in areas that regularly get savaged by hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

> This is what worries me: climate change leading to entirely new regimes that we don't understand and thus can't model or predict with any accuracy.

People have been talking about that for a while, we're playing god right now but we have no idea what's coming. It's the same thing every time we try something with nature, what seems easy and simple turns out to have massive side effects we couldn't imagine because every little thing is inter dependant

faster... than expected you say?

https://www.fasterthanexpected.com/

All models are wrong, some are useful.

At the scale we're talking about, with the number of cases we have (one, Earth), all our models are going to become more and more wrong the further off from our current equilibrium we get. But yes, Day After Tomorrow.

The worse the situation becomes, the less will be done.

We could have taken action even 10, 20, or 40 years ago, but so far, we have done nothing significant to prevent it from happening.

The longer we wait, the more expensive and complicated the solutions will become. Politicians are often reluctant to make unpopular moves that might anger their base, so they tend to focus on short-term goals rather than long-term sustainability (though Bernie might have been an exception, imho). We are searching for solutions that maintain the status quo.

One of the most significant issues is the exponential growth driven by our financial system's need for constant growth. Yet, we have not even begun to start discussing that.

https://futureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/great_acc...

> If we don't, who will?

Those few who'll somehow manage to stay alive.

Republicans have made climate denial part of their identity. The US isn't capable of doing anything federally until the nation is reunified.

Thankfully, China has already been making large investments in solar power and batteries. Might not be enough to save us, but it's enough to note.

I think it wouldn't even require so much as a WW2 mobilization. It needs 3-6% of GDP (globally) to replace fossils fuels and get to net Zero.

The intellectual energy in the US is entirely beholden to economics at the present. There are plenty of intelligent individuals who could be mobilized on this issue but by and large they are subjugated by the language of economics into chasing teh dollarz.

Like you mentioned, mobilization is possible, look at WW2, intellectuals were entirely captured to serve military efforts during that period. Then w/ the neolib period it shifted to being captured by the language of economics which is where we are currently.

It really is on the precarious cognitariat to break the shackles of the current burden of working inside of the stagnant linguistic framework of economics. Economics is anti-science.

Don't look up!

Gah what a load of drivel. Seriously, if this is the kind of site that informs you there are other priceless nuggets on there such as 'China’s CCP Concealed SARS-CoV-2 Presence in China as Far Back as March 2018'. I'm all for engaging the argument but in this case there is this torrent of nonsense that doesn't even begin to compute and which it would take you a lifetime to properly debunk, at which point I don't doubt the author has created some more masterpieces. The name of the blog already sets you up for being gullible.

That's a whole boatload of misdirection and but maybe.

Yes, the sun shines and brings energy from above, yes the core is hot and brings energy from below.

This was known centuries ago and is accounted for.

"The ethical skeptic" is just parroting another form of denialism; it's not us, it's the flucuations from the sun, it's not us, the core is suddenly radiating more heat outwards, maybe it's the volcanos, perhaps it's cosmic rays.

The thermodynamics here is straightforward enough, we have put a measureably significant volume of thermal insulating gas into the atmosphere and have the records to prove it, more energy from the sun is being trapped, the land | sea surface layer has more energy for storms, tipping climate cell behaviour, heating, etc.

We know by direct measurements that the warming is largely due to greenhouse gases, because we can measure radiation inflow and outflow and see that greenhouse gases are stopping incoming radiation from being radiated out and we can see how much is being trapped.

We know it is the greenhouse gases because we can measure the wavelengths of the incoming and outgoing radiation and see from spectrographs of greenhouse gases that the outgoing radiation falls into greenhouse gas absorption bands.

We can tell that the increase in greenhouse gases over the last couple hundred years is largely from human burning of fossil fuels because the carbon in fossil fuels has a different isotope ratio than that of carbon in living or recently living things. (Volcanic greenhouse gases would also have a similar isotope ratio to fossil fuels but we have sufficient monitoring to detect and account for geologic greenhouse gases).

> I don't believe there is anything we can do about the impending climate changes.

But there is (something we could do).

Climate change is caused by pollution and overconsumption.

We're perfectly capable to change that ... we just don't want to.

If we don't, the nature will force us.

As it does with every species in overshoot.

> all we can do is learn, prepare, and adapt

But we don't know how it will play out. Imagine building a jenga tower. You'll remove a brick from the base and put it on top. The more you build the less stable the structure becomes.

Our society is an extremely complex system.

We don't know when and how, but we know it will collapse. And nobody can even know how it will look, what to expect, and what to prepare for.

Even those bunkers of our tech elites won't do them much good.

We can't adapt to something that keeps changing. If we keep putting out CO2, the climate will keep getting hotter. It's not as if giving up will make it stop here. It really can go to 8C or more, a temperature that will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable.

We're going to be forced to make changes -- not just "adapt" but substantially alter society. The longer we wait the worse it will be.

Adapting is actually a bad decision. If everyone invests into local counter measures such as ACs or flood walls rather than reducing emissions, we might take away resources spend on the cause of climate change.

The estimated cost for net zero are only 3-6% of global GDP per year until 2050. Totally doable.

Sure we can. We can start spreading Serpentine rock on the Ocean's surface. We just need some billionaires to fund it.

Serpentine rock, which is primarily composed of the mineral serpentine, has been considered in the context of climate change mitigation due to its potential to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) through a natural process called mineral carbonation. This process involves the reaction of CO2 with certain minerals, like serpentine, to form stable carbonate minerals like magnesite.

The reaction kinetics of carbonation using serpentine rock are generally slow under ambient temperature and pressure conditions, which is one of the main challenges in utilizing serpentine for carbon sequestration. The rate of the natural carbonation process depends on various factors, such as the particle size of the serpentine, temperature, pressure, and availability of CO2.

At ambient conditions, the carbonation of serpentine can take from several months to thousands of years to proceed to completion. The slow reaction kinetics is mainly due to the formation of a passivating silica-rich layer on the surface of serpentine minerals, which hinders the further reaction with CO2.

However, if we ground up serpentine rock into 1cm pieces and sprinkled it on the Caribbean sea between Cuba and Jamaica, we can estimate how many tons we would need to use to carbonize our deficit of 15 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide:

To estimate this, we need to consider the stoichiometry of the carbonation reaction. Serpentine rock primarily contains the mineral serpentine, which has the chemical formula Mg3Si2O5(OH)4. The carbonation reaction involving serpentine can be represented as:

Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + 3CO2 → 3MgCO3 + 2SiO2 + 2H2O

Here, one mole of serpentine reacts with three moles of CO2 to form three moles of magnesite (MgCO3) as the primary carbon capture product.

Now, let's calculate the molar masses:

Serpentine (Mg3Si2O5(OH)4): (3 × 24.305) + (2 × 28.085) + (5 × 15.999) + (4 × 1.008) = 277.24 g/mol CO2: (12.011) + (2 × 15.999) = 44.01 g/mol

From the balanced equation, three moles of CO2 react with one mole of serpentine. Therefore, the mass ratio of serpentine to CO2 is:

277.24 g/mol (serpentine) / 3 × 44.01 g/mol (CO2) = 2.087

To sequester 15 Gt of CO2, we would need:

15 Gt × 2.087 = 31.305 Gt (gigatons) of serpentine rock

However, this calculation assumes that the carbonation reaction would go to completion, which is unlikely in a real-world scenario, especially with 1 cm pieces of serpentine rock. The reaction kinetics would be extremely slow with such large particles, and the reaction may not proceed effectively in the ocean environment. Grinding the serpentine rock into much finer particles, using catalysts or additives, or applying pressure and temperature could enhance the reaction rate, would perhaps make it go faster.

I agree there is nothing we can do to prevent the next 30 years or so of climate change.

However, there is plenty we can do longer-term.

Step 1: USA via coalition (or alone, it doesn't matter) goes Nuclear (Fission). Global energy consumption is 17.4 Terawatts. About 4 Terawatts of that is us. We therefore need about 4000 nuclear power plants to cover our usage (which, given the economy of scale, would probably cost about 4 Trillion or so). It would take 15 years to build them out, so that's about $280 billion a year. Not particularly expensive, given the overall federal budget is $6 trillion. In addition to domestic construction, we offer generous construction deals to all other countries at-cost with shared IP. Any country can sign up, and the US will use it's hegemony to backup all deals in a "too big to fail" kind of way. Note that we only need about $24 trillion to build out power for the rest of the world, which again isn't a substantial component of anyone's budget (except for developing countries, for which we would just provide the reactors for free/via loan schemes). China will probably do it themselves, so that's like another 5TW capacity we don't need to build.

Step 2: We change out the infrastructure. Massive funding, drowning-in-money level funding for Hydrogen aircraft. Massive funding for electric cars & electric grid improvements. Build out HSR between all cities & build out public transit to sap down air travel / car travel. Cut energy use & de-carbonize.

Step 3: Turn the CO2 in the air back into fossil fuel, or capture it into some other form. We build 17 TWatts of nuclear capacity, so we have plenty of energy. We need only scale up the chemical processes for doing the conversion.

Once completed, we can now "tune" CO2 levels, giving us a lever for global weather control. This will likely be a useful tool for humanity & will let us dynamically control mean surface temperature.

This is a bit of a conspiracy-laden, incoherent approach to the problem.

How about we don't try to control the population (but still take good care of the environment?)

Perhaps by now we could already be building space colonies if it weren't for these kind of reactionary, knee-jerk responses to problems.

You are 30 years late. The world at large didn’t wait for you. Fertility has been declining worldwide for decades and been subreplacement in the USA and Europe for quite sometimes. South East Asia and Africa are slowly getting there too. Population is only an issue because of demographic lag. It’s already sorted out. We just have to pass the bump.

Indeed. Essentially, the resources available to the average person are sum_of_all_resources / total_nr_of_people. The amount of a lot of resources (energy, food, mobility, communication) to go around has grown greatly since the industrial revolution. But some resources, like land, minerals, fish in the sea, are just fundamentally limited. The only way to have more on average is to diverse what is available by less people.

Or you can just take more for yourself by stealing it from the less privileged and future generations, which seems to be the current modus operandi...

> step one in population control is shutting down immigration

Yes, overconsume so much, that it heats the entire planet. Live in an area where is isn't as bad as elsewhere.

Build walls around borders to keep those suckers threatened with loss of livelihood to keep them our of our utopia.

Bad news, buddy.

Once those hundreds of millions/billions start moving, no walls are gonna stop them.

https://i.imgur.com/LaEFQmV.png

The relevant overpopulation is the overpopulation of rich people (curable by removal of wealth).

How does preventing immigration effect the global population?