Global warming predictions are overestimated, suggests study on black carbon | Hacker News Reader

Global warming predictions are overestimated, suggests study on black carbon

news.cornell.edu

29 pointsrugger38 comments

"... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds...."

Freeman Dyson

Dyson also describes a solution to any warming that is relevant to the article: better land management.

It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then soil, then back.

Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy.

Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil:

1. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal

2. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.

I think it's important to consider the amount of fossil fuels we are using. One example that springs to mind at one of the older coal power plants in WV they decided to change the location where they deposited the coal ash that was left over. It turns out over the last 40 years they had just kept making a larger mount and it was about to become the tallest mountain in the state. Now you might wonder how this ends up but the simple fact is coal is mindbogglingly cheep. There is literally mounds of the stuff which you basically pickup off the ground. (It's slightly worse than that but not by much.)

In Appalachia there are coal fires that have been burning for thirty or forty years, and they are allowed to keep burning because the coal is worth less than what it would cost to pipe in enough water to put out the fires.

I'm not sure about the all the science behind this (it's a very big field...), but those at real climate have addressed some of the issues here, for example: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freema...

Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.

  the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined

I don't believe that. Add the sea, and I doubly don't believe it. There's no reason it need be trees. It could just as easily be plankton.

There is a lot less biomass in the ocean than you might think. Huge areas of the ocean are nutrient to the point they don't support significant life.

Additionally, one of the issues with increased CO2 content in the oceans is acidification. The oceans can't absorb more CO2, even in biomass, without this occurring.

"We know from measurements that climate change today is worse than people have predicted," said Lehmann. "But this particular aspect, black carbon's stability in soil, if incorporated in climate models, would actually decrease climate predictions."

This is based on soil studies of a limited number of sites in Australia. It implies that as these soils contained more black carbon (soot) than thought - which takes 1-2k yrs to convert to CO2, rather than 100 yrs for organic carbon - soil will contribute less to global warming.

This makes sense but surely to include this in global climate models, you'd need good soot content estimates for a variety of soils worldwide? Either a good global average derived from a wide range of measurements, or an actual global soil map included in the simulation?

>soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact.

(from the article)

It seems the only thing every side can agree on is that pollution is bad. If you can reduce pollution & consumption without incurring additional costs (not just monetary), please try to do so.

I think the divide isn't really between "believing" in global warming or not - but between blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism, and placing as a premise for a solution that we can't allow our progress to slow down to fix this, and we CERTAINLY can't ask China and India to slow down theirs.

The former is (roughly) the Kyoto/Copenhagen bunch, the latter is the "spend A LOT - NOW on nuclear energy (we need a lot of energy, and it will keep growing) and research in energy storage (fuel cells etc.) and biotech (get rid of the C02 we already have)".

There's a lot of people who think it's all a media scam. Go to freerepublic.com or listen to Rush if you dare.

blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism

Industry in communist countries tended to be a lot more polluting, actually.

The reality is, that even with computers 100 times more powerful than we have now, the problem remains: we don't have the ability to accurately come up with a working mathematical model of "how it works" - much less run that model through a computer.

How did gibsonf1 miss this one?

I highly recommend James Hogan's Kicking the Sacred Cow. He very persuasively shows the baselessness of some of science's most strongly believed "facts." This applies not only to global warming, but also things like Darwinism, AIDs, environmental scares, even the big bang and relativity.

How about the round earth?

Random global warming thought; can anyone here believe that we'll have a technological singularity in 20 years, and be worried about global warming?

I just realized that's why I'm not worried about it. I.e. technology will probably save us. Am I too optimistic?

20 years?! We can't even make an AI as smart as an ant yet.

needn't be AI. What about biotech etc?

That's not what Singulatarians believe.

Kurzweil suggests that these technological improvements happen on an exponential scale -- that the gap from 0 to ant is greater than from ant to human.

I like basing my life on theories that are not complete speculation.

We have AI smarter than a single ant and we know enough about ant brains to be able to tell. One of the branches of AI research focuses on modeling neurons and building systems which demonstrate identical behaviors to tapeworms or ant's etc. The next step seems to be modeling rat brains, but the gap between human and rat is a lot smaller than the gap between rat and ant.

When the stakes are this big, I would advise hedging your bets.

Yes. Think of the probability you'd need to have before you could 'stop worrying about things.' You have to think that it were 99% likely that 'the singularity' would show up in 20, or 50 years!

The singularity is always 20 years ahead.

This is no singulatiry. CPU speeds have hit a wall, the exponential growth of CPU speed is dead.

The only thing left is massively parallel, but we can do that now, no need to wait, and we still don't have a singularity.

Moore's law is most interesting in terms of cost these days, not clock speed. The cost per cycle is still dropping.

If you believe in miracles then, yes, you're too optimistic.

If we can magically create software that can create software that is more intelligent than humans, then the singularity is nigh.

The solution to global warming will most likely be a series of clever "hacks" such as electric cars, recycling, carban taxes, turning off the lights when you leave a room, etc. Most of all changing politicians to increase the speed of change.

There doesn't seem to be a giant off switch that can wipe out global warming.

There doesn't seem to be a giant off switch that can wipe out global warming.

There is. All you have to do is bury trees in giant holes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080513101652.ht...

I thought of this, did 15 seconds of research to see if any studies had been done, and it's pretty clear that, not only is it practical, it would be fairly cheap. Doesn't matter. The whole point of "global warming" is the same as every other leftist movement, control over the economy.

This is an interesting concept. I'm curious how much of it is offset by the large earth movers required for biomass burial.

Also, the land required to plant AND bury all the biomass towards this end would have to be roughly the size of North America. Albeit creative, this does not seem like the definitive solution to global warming unless you have some serious political muscle.

How exactly will burying gigatons of CO2 from growing gigatons of trees after pulling up gigatons of CO2 from the same earth not constitute massive control over the economy? One billion hectares?!! That's 10,000,000 km^2. That is more half the 19,824,000 km^2 of total arable land! There isn't enough arable land for food! You'd have to take it from lands far less fertile. And where?

What you are suggesting is a massive 'carbon cycling' economy, digging up CO2 from fossil fuels, burning it, recovering that CO2 from trees, and then burying it. Over long, long timescales, this is the same process by which the fossil fuels were synthesized. It should be least plausible that this is not the most efficient thing we can come up with!

The "billion" figure equals the total amount of CO2 produced, which is not the amount that would actually have to be planted and buried. I'm not sure why they quoted that figure, as the actual figure would be much less. It wouldn't involve arable land anyway, but more-or-less useless land in Siberia and Canada.

The primary difference here is that it isn't pre-emptive. If it turns out that global warming is an actual problem, then and only then, it can be countered by burying trees. If it turns out that global warming was all a ruse (probable enough) then nothing needs to be done.

What's the actual figure? That one billion figure corresponds to all the carbon dioxide released in a year. Think of it. To counteract our carbon emissions, you have to cut down and bury 10,000,000 km^2 of forest per year! Even if we do 1% of that, that corresponds with the average deforestation over the past century. That's an industry larger than the forestry industry, because we need to grow all of those trees, and then bury them.

Regarding global warming, it may not be catastrophic, but it's... absurd to call it a hoax. Average temperatures are rising. Do you have another explanation for the receding ice caps, then? Do you have a different prediction for the greenland glacier? If the north pole is free of ice in the summer, ice must be melting in Greenland, too. If it's melting in the summer faster than accretion in the winter, the Greenland ice is melting. If the Greenland ice is melting then unless Antarctica is growing, the sea level will rise. According the geological record, the ice caps grow and retreat in a nonlinear way; suddenly, in other words. According to the wikipedia:

"If small glaciers and polar ice caps on the margins of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula melt, the projected rise in sea level will be around 0.5 m. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise. The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5-6 m."

Additionally, it is estimated that a sea level rise of just 20cm could create 740,000 homeless people in Nigeria. and already there is evidence that diseases from warmer climates, such as malaria, are growing in extent. http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/11/report-climate.html

A 2004 World Health Organization study estimates that climatic changes that have been occurring since the mid-1970s caused more than 150K deaths by 2000 through increasing incidences of diseases such as diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition, primarily in developing countries. The study projects a potential doubling of climate-related deaths by 2030.

Are you claiming that these aren't happening, or that they aren't problems?

I wonder what affect the studies on black carbon will have on the projected prevalence of the man-bear-pig?

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