Global CO2 Levels
co2levels.org
co2levels.org
Recently (since 2010ish but moreso since 2020 in shipping) there has been a global effort to reduce SO2 emissions (eg by installing scrubbers) which has caused the CO2 increase over the last 150 years to actually "take effect" since the SO2 is no longer negating the effects.
I stumbled upon this theory recently and it sounds compelling but am curious if better informed people could shine a light about this.
https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1687535525169930241
https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8/status/1688145475289931776
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/07/sea-surface-temperatu...
It's called Termination Shock.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it is the most-researched solar geoengineering method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5 °C”
There’s a risk it’d affect the ozone layer. But Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize for his ozone research in 95, said the sulfur plan is “the only option available to rapidly reduce temp rises and counteract other climactic effects”.
We’d also need to add shockingly little SO2 to the stratosphere. We currently emit 200m tons per year (25% is humans, rest is volcanos and other natural sources). We’d need to add an extra 100k per year.
Edit: I think one of the Microsoft co-founders was looking into it, the problems of proving it would work were political - not engineering-related.
200M + 100k = 200.1M, and I doubt the 200M figure had 4 significant figures.
Dumping boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere is second order from the actual goal of producing electricity so most people just can't/don't/won't think about it.
In this case we'd be intentionally dumping SO2 so people are capable of thinking "wow that's not moral" or whatever issue they might have with it.
Don't want to accidentally start an ice age by trying to prevent a hothouse planet from forming :P
Or maybe if some billionaire could figure out a way for their space-tourism project to “accidentally” produce SO2, then we’d give them the moral mulligan.
What kind of infrastructure would be required to put it where it needs to go?
Especially if we consider the fact that you would be putting upwards of 200t[0] of CO2 into roughly the same altitude Only to deliver maybe 5 tons of sulfur.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/19/billionaires...
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/FlyingBlind.14Se...
> To achieve a 2 °C result, the plan would inject 6.7 teragrams (6.7 billion kg/14.8 billion lb) of sulfur dioxide per year into each pole, calling for an eye-watering total of 13.4 teragrams (29.5 billion lb) of material annually.
>The study goes on to look at logistics, finding that existing aircraft can't carry enough payload to a sufficient height to get the job done... To hit the cooling target, this project would need 125 purpose-built SAIL-43Ks, flying a total of 1,458 missions per day during the four-month injection period at each pole. These planes would take off, climb for 30 minutes, vent their entire load of sulfur dioxide within two minutes, then come back down over the following 30 minutes, and spend the next hour loading up again and refueling for the next mission.
> All sulfur oxides are nasty to breathe in, harming the lungs and causing asthma and bronchitis if inhaled regularly... It notes that the effects of teragrams of sulfur dioxide and the associated acid rain deposits are risky both to humans and to the wider ecosystem, requiring lots more research. And it expects some stratospheric heating as well.
So yeah, we could. It would be expensive (but not $trillions), and the environmental effects would be horrific.
And yet its still being proposed, because that's how desperate we are.
Why can't people use normal units. If you absolutely must use imperial units then at least use tons.
...A decade before starting, maybe?
Thats the problem with climate change. The tipping points are so disconnected from the collective pain thresholds.
> For the sort of globally effective SAI deployment in the tropics and sub-tropics envisioned in (Smith and Wagner 2018) and (Smith 2020), a deployment altitude of 20 km is commonly assumed in order to remain well above the tropopause, which can often appear as high as 17 km in the tropics. Injection of large masses of aerosols at 20 km is not judged to be feasible with existing aircraft, requiring the development of new lofting platforms designed for this mission as envisioned
Ground deployment is not extensively discussed, but perhaps the referenced papers discuss the necessity of high altitude more.
Assuming that's done, the environmental side effects should be negligible, as I understand it. The stratosphere is pretty isolated from the atmosphere we live in, and the SO2 breaks down there over 1-2 years.
> the way that sulfuric acid eventually leaves the atmosphere is by combining into larger and larger droplets that eventually become heavy enough to fall down to earth as acid rain
But I couldn't quickly find any supporting facts, so this is just me saying "I think I read that somewhere".
Maybe the main factor is that the SO2 stays up there for 1-2 years, which gives a lot of cooling "bang" for the acid rain "buck".
Yes.. there is an entire section in the IPCC report dedicated to this. This is also the reason they believe there is a "missing volcanic eruption," as it would explain data anomalies in their back projections. Make of that what you will.
It's been all around twitter. Casey Handmer writes about it in depth, worth checking out.
* It's not just SO2, but soot and other particulates that reflect sunlight, in particular IR.
* SO2 (and soot etc, for that matter) have other side effects; its not that they were eliminated for no reason. And the point of any ecological activity (not just climate intervention) is to make the environment more supportive to human life and ativity. Stratospheric SO2 advocates tend to dismiss these issues.
* solar radiation adjustment has other consequences (on agriculture, for example). In the case of SO2 the frequencies reflected by SO2 are not all ones we want to do without -- we need some UV to get through.
* Stratospheric SO2 injection (AKA "SAI") is hard to switch off, so if we are unhappy with the results (widespread reduction in agriculture, if that's what happens) we would be waiting years, possibly decades, to get things back on track.
Solar radiation can also be managed at a more local level in the troposphere through marine cloud brightening for example, and can be done with more benign chemicals than SO2 (e.g. water), and can be switched on and off quite rapidly (days). It will use more energy and activity, but also provide greater control (in some locations on the water you may not want increased shade because of microscopic marine life).
Note I am working on removal of ambient greenhouse gas (CH4) and so am quite sensitive to the safety and consequences of intervention.
In the case of the arctic there are non-atmospheric (i.e. surface) interventions being investigated as well to change the local albedo. In fact the best way to brighten the arctic (and glaciers) is to reduce particulate emissions — and it’s happening!
Yeah. Pump that shit into our atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong?
Let’s not kid ourselves, global cooling is FAR worse than global warming. Ice ages are no joke.
The risk/reward bet here is that we put jussst enough SO2 to drop by X degrees. I’m just not confident enough in our computational capacity to account for all the variables that could produce unintended consequences.
Tangential, but we can’t even figure out proper programs/legislation to improve education or reduce inner city poverty.
As a person from a cold country I'm not so sure about that. It's much easier to dress up on a cold day than to cool down on a hot day. It's cheaper to warm up a house than to cool it down. There are way less diseases/viruses/insects in cold climates. Granted, the food is much harder to come by, though, unless it's maritime (cold waters are much more abundant with life than warm oceans).
And in case of global warning, if it ever gets too cold, we know what to do.
-1912 newspaper (New Zealand) https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814....
It would have much more impact and be less misleading if they started at 0.
Not starting at 0 both lets people dismiss the graph because they used the stupid not-starting-at-zero trick, and it hides the fact that CO2 concentration has increased by 50% which is insane!
Offsetting zero is an annoying practice.
"The co2 level is N standard deviations out of the ordinary compared to preindustrial times" feels more useful here, but reading that requires basic statistics (which general audiences probably lacks).
Would be cool to see that value on the graph, also a median/average/max preindustrial value.
That said I do feel like when people do that it is not a great practice.
What you probably meant is that 33% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is "man-made".
For financials or percentages, shifting the baseline from 0 can be misleading. For ppm I think it is a good thing.
What we need is a bright horizontal line that says ">50% chance your society collapses in the lifetime of your children", one that says ">50% chance your society collapses in your lifetime", and one that says ">50% chance your species does not survive 100 years." To properly frame the stakes and the significance of the numbers.
That's not far from the default for all of us anyway, isn't it?
Soviet Union fell apart in my lifetime; my parents were born during and just before WW2, got to see the Winds of Change.
I'm not sure about my grandparents, other than one grandmother's funeral anecdote being that she wandered off unsupervised as an infant, which had the people looking after her scared she had been eaten by a tiger because this was in a military camp in the British Raj.
No Ottoman empire, no Austro-Hungarians, and the borders of the Germany I moved to no longer go as far as what's now Калининград.
if anything, for normies, temperature is far less well understood than concentration, especially WRT zero.
Either way, it should never be labeled "bad practice", as it was done here.
We didn't even get oxygen until 2.4 billion years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
Do you have any evidence to back up this statement?
Is there a certain type of evidence that would placate your very specifically worded and anti-intellectually framed question?
I doubt climate deniers are specially aware of chart layout. Most have very little scientific education, unsurprisingly. But go ahead and prove me wrong.
> your very specifically worded and anti-intellectually framed question
Random insults now. Nice.
I understand that for line graphs, where you are looking at variations rather than absolutes, this is acceptable, but in this case.
- This is an interactive graph, at least give us the option of starting at zero.
- CO2 went from 280 ppm to 420 ppm, it is significant enough to see the variations even on an absolute scale.
- Don't make the bottom line (x axis) stand out as it does now, especially considering that the y axis doesn't stand out.
Why? I think there's some intuitive idea that something is being hidden or there's cheating in the presentation, but that doesn't have to be the case if the purpose of the plot is to illustrate relative change (and the y axis is clearly labeled).
The counter-argument is that it makes it look like CO2 has 10x'd instead of doubling, but since those values aren't calibrated in units that we can intuitively understand, it's not obviously the correct choice to start at 0.
* 1000 - 1958: Historical CO2 record from the Law Dome DE08, DE08-2, and DSS ice cores
* 1958 - Today: in situ air measurements at Mauna Loa, Observatory, Hawaii.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/....
The zig zags are a reasonably smooth yearly wave if you zoom into them.
Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~1 millimeter of carbon.
Globally, we emit about ~13x that per year.
That's about equivalent to covering the state of Massachusetts in a foot of carbon.
Per year.
The entire planet is either the ocean, in use, desert, or already covered in forests.
~33% of the earth is desert. We'd need a decent chunk of that to get ~0% fossil fuel energy. But let's pretend we don't. We'd still need to cover all of that in several feet of carbon to capture all of our emissions.
It is not going to happen.
That would only account for ~10% of global emissions.
It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Honestly, hope seems like a better strategy and less a waste of time than that.
If you really want to discuss it - you should preface very discussion with - "This isn't going to make the slightest difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but hear me out anyway..."
Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend like there is any viable alternative from phasing out fossil fuels almost entirely.
The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could - much to the younger generations detriment.
Economics alone should phase out ~60% of fossil fuel usage by 2050. There is nothing they can do to change that at this point.
Unfortunately, depending on the curve - the planet could get way hotter by then.
But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
Here's what the IPCC said [0]:
> “The technical geological CO2 storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 gigatonnes of CO2, which is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor.” – SPM, p. 37
IEA said similar [1].
[0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say...
[1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-has-vast-capacity...
We wouldn't ... ?
Billions of gallons of crude oil are removed from the earth every year, millions upon millions of tons of stone are mined from the earth every year.
I'm misunderstanding how "covering Texas" is a meaningful measure in terms of carbon capture.
> It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%
I'm unsure how you've come to this metric or conclusion honestly.
> Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend....
The oil industry seems to be interested in pivoting to CCS because it is dependent on pipelines and drilling infrastructure, which is comfortably inside their position at global-scale. The fact that they caused a large portion of the problem is tangential - practically speaking. Blame who you will, we have a problem and there is an army of geological engineers and pipeline experts, etc etc with decades of experience to draw from.
> The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could
This is myopic and honestly childish
> But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
......
That's not a complete argument.
Do you have a critique of the IPCC's stance that CCS is part of the solution and necessary to decarbonize hard to abate sectors like steel/cement? [0]
[0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say...
In the short term - CC is not a solution - there's too much carbon being emitted and there isn't an economical, scalable solution anyway.
We are going to emit what we're going to emit - and no amount of realistic CC is ever going to dent what we've already done by the time the technology is ready.
While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though).
The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon.
If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.
AFAIK, we don't have Canada and Russia sized 1000 foot-deep spaces readily available to store carbon.
Technology isn't a problem as far as I'm concerned. Space is.
Would love to be proved wrong and have yet another reason to be optimistic about the future.
Then what?
And by the way - to eliminate maybe one year's worth of emissions, it'd take a forest ~30 years to grow...
And what're we supposed to eat?
If we're all just going to starve to death - we don't have to worry about cutting emissions...
And it doesn't need to be 1000 feet deep, just a few meters worth since we only need to collect an equivalent of a fraction of the CO2 that's stored in peatlands - which cover only about 3% of the Earth's land surface to begin with*. The trick is to sink it in just the right way to keep it from reentering the carbon cycle.
We actually do have a lot of space that's already capturing far more carbon than we ever possibly could ourselves, the organisms filling that space just evolved to maximize survival, not maximize carbon capture to save humanity.
* Edit: actually that's just cold climate peatlands, I haven't seen estimates for tropical peatlands
659663 * 1000 * 1000 * 2.6 = 1,715,123,800,000 tons (1.7 trillion tons)
of carbon. One billion tons of carbon would make a Texas-covering graphite layer about 0.58 millimeters thick.
That seems high. I get a lot smaller number, but maybe I've messed up some unit conversions. I'm using:
1 ton = 10^3 kg
1 g CO2 = 12/44 g of C (C == carbon, not Celsius)
Density of C is 2.2 g/cm^3
1 Texas = 6.95x10^5 km^2
10^9 tons CO2 x 10^3 kg/ton x 10^3 g/kg = 10^15 g CO2
10^15 g CO2 x 12/44 g C/g CO2 = 2.7x10^14 g C
2.7x10^14 g C x 1 cm^3 C/2.2 g C = 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C
6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas x 10^10 cm^2/km^2 = 6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas
1.2x10^14 cm^3 C / (6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas) = 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C
1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C x 1 km / 10^5 cm = 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C
1.7x10^-7 Texas km C x 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas = 1.2x10^-1 km^3 C
1.17x10^-1 km^3 C x 10^15 cm^3/km^3 x 2.2 gm C/cm^3 C = 2.57x10^14 gm C
2.57 gm C x 44 gm CO2/12 gm c x 1 ton/10^6 gm = 9.4 x 10^8 ton CO2 = 0.9 gigaton CO2
PPS: If we took all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere, the amount of carbon would be enough to cover to Texas to about 53 cm.
Not as ridiculous - but still not a solution.
One nice thing about carbon capture is it doesn't matter much where you do it. The atmosphere does a great job of spreading CO2 nearly uniformly. You just need places with sufficient available energy and somewhere to put the carbon.
One possibility would be subtropical deserts. They have plenty of sunlight for energy and plenty of land that could be used without displacing many people.
Imagine carbon capture facilities that consist of a solar farm for power with the panels mounted a few meters off the ground, and we dump the captured carbon under the panels.
As calculated earlier, 1 gigaton of captured CO2 would give enough carbon to cover Texas to a depth of 0.017 cm. There are about 3000 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so if we captured all of it, that would cover Texas to a depth of 51 cm.
The 5 largest subtropical deserts have a combined area 22 times as big as Texas. If we covered just 10% of that area in solar farms to power carbon capture with a meter of room under the solar panels we'd have plenty of storage space.
At the efficiency of current solar farms and current carbon capture, they would be capturing about 10% more carbon per year than we are currently emitting. Cover 90% of those 5 deserts with such plants and in under a decade we could get back to preindustrial CO2 levels.
The big limit that I see on doing this is production of solar panels. At current production rates, covering 10% of the 5 largest subtropical deserts would use about 180 years worth of solar panels.
I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
Yes, that is the problem. It is pie in the sky to believe that's happening any time soon. It would take >20 years before it's making any meaningful dent in emissions.
We're going to keep emitting CO2 at current rates for close to a decade before they really start to drop. You're looking at ~1/3rd of the earth being covered in solar panels and ~15 feet of carbon. Maybe I'm naive. I just can't imagine it.
You think we're going to do that and we can't even build nuclear power plants? That would've mostly solved the problem before it even happened.
And I imagine that would have cost 10,000x less.
> I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
I don't know enough about the materials used for CC, but for solar panels - raw elements is not a problem if you're planning to use 90% of subtropical deserts...
When I try to imagine that, I can't help it. I see leaves mounted on top of a tree. Using solar power to bind carbon into a dense trunk package below. Ready to be carted off and hidden below grounds.
Also, given that we can't find anyone willing to pay for carbon capturing right where it is most dense, at the source, how are we going to find the will to pay for capturing it from thin air at much higher cost...
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ is a great summary of some of the more recent work in the area. It's astonishing how poorly we understand this system in the macro.
measurement, not "guesstimate"
One thing the GP post didn't mention is that in that time period the entire US midwest was an inland ocean. Many counties that we have today simply won't exist.
20 000 years ago we also had a massive number of big game animals which grazed in gigantic herds on vast prairies. These prairies don’t exist anymore, and neither do the herds.
On top of that, our historic sources don’t reach this far back, and our archeological records gets really blurry this far back, so what do you know. Perhaps there were multiple time periods where societies did indeed collapse, where a governing structure spanning an entire region was suddenly and violently disrupted and never returned, with cultures and languages lost with no descendants. Surely this happened multiple times between 30 and 20 thousand years ago.
Around 3000 years ago society in the Middle East, North Africa and Balkans certainly did collapse because of some volcanic eruptions and the subsequent migration crisis and the market failure of a single industry.
So a lot of stuff going on really. I think similarly through our lives there will be all sorts of stuff going on such that the sea rising a foot or so will be not that noticable.
The climate crisis isn’t just the sea-level rise, I think civilization would survive Florida and Bangladesh going under (but it will suck). But our climate crisis is this sea-level rise at the same time as a bunch of wild fires, more powerful hurricanes, crop failures, droughts, ocean acidification, etc. All of this in tangent will result in mass migration, just like the Sea Peoples, just in the opposite direction. And unless our governments change their border policies (unlikely) there will be wars and destruction in our remaining cities.
We are seeing many people dying in various climate related disasters (by some estimate covid level numbers and growing).
We are seeing crop failures, a mass extinction event, we are seeing pests becoming more severe, both in the natural world (see the giant Sequoias in Yosamite) as well as in our crops. This will get worse. Note, we will probably have enough food, but just like now, it will not be evenly distributed. Expect famines in the future. Currently things are not so bad.
We are seeing a lot of people fleeing their homes, and we are not seeing anybody accepting them as refugees. As the climate warms further, one can expect either our refugee policy changes and we open our borders (unlikely) or we can expect wars to break out as migration crises become severe (likely).
As the global hunger increases, as global wealth distribution gets worse, and as the global poor are at serious risk of dying from climate disasters, famin, etc. As tension grows on our borders, and as our governments become increasingly hostile towards refugees, then I honestly don’t see how our democratic world can survive.
Of course our governments can make the right choice and open our borders, then it will be a different world, that still sucks from all our climate related disasters, but at least it might survive. The other option is a increasingly facistical world. Which in my book is definitely civilization crushing.
It's got hugely better over the last 30 years (poor countries vs rich) and I see no signs of the trend reversing.
https://today.tamu.edu/2021/06/14/ancient-deepsea-shells-rev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_boundary
If you can remember the Jurassic Park tagline (original movie), "an adventure 65 million years in the making", then you've got a good ballpark figure for this.
Edit: I saw my dead sibling pointed to a graph which is some weird logarithmic-linear hybrid, i.e. it show three distinct timeperiods in three different scales. This is indeed a rather odd way of representing data, and I don’t think it is helpful.
That perioid may be a somewhat large peak in a co2 graph, making the current co2 increase look negligible. However ocean levels are also estimated to have been 50-100 meters higher than today at that period, along many other side effects.
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1104789
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1510037
Cognitive impairment seems to get really noticeable at ~1000 ppm.
As CO2 reaches over 500PPM (this is not that far away) that doubling of CO2 levels from being indoors puts us in the cognitive impairment range. Not good.
[1] https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/data/index.php?category=Greenhouse%2...
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CO2_07.j...
I'm not a warming denier but framing everything to make things look bad has adverse effects too.
Also the ups and downs in temperatures happened over a far longer period of time than what we're experiencing now, giving life more time to adapt.
Full context: https://u4d2z7k9.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Co2... from https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
For reference on ppm of other materials that are acceptable in the workplace: https://www.osha.gov/annotated-pels/table-z-1
CO2 is arguably just shows the transfer of one carbon organism to another
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01274-4
Would be cool to overlay the co2 levels with other things (such as tree growth, etc)
I believe too much CO2 in the atmosphere is a bad thing, but it is hard to find good, global suggested remediations to this issue.
- I use public transportation with my family of 6. (We do not own a car). - My kids walk to school ~1 mile away. - I stopped buying oak, because I read somewhere oak removes a good amount of CO2 over other types of trees. - We live in an area where it is easy to find evironmentally-concerned food producers and buy from them.
What else is there left for us to do?
https://today.tamu.edu/2021/06/14/ancient-deepsea-shells-rev...
Is it fair to assume the earth is a closed loop self healing system?
That is even if we dump a lot of bad stuff into the atmosphere, the planet will eventually “equalize” to “normal” levels.
I would rather we did not of course. I’m just curious about the planetary atmospheric system.
Life on Earth can adapt to a new normal, certainly, and on a geological timescale normal has shifted many times. Humans will adapt too, but will likely endure catastrophic losses on the way.
The surface of the ocean is in equilibrium with the atmosphere, so increasing atmospheric ppm increase the ppm of CO2 in the mix layer (think of it as a gas sponge). The ocean buffers that co2 (carbonate/bicarbonate system), so the amount of carbon there is a lot higher than just 420ppm, and in doing so it becomes slightly more acidic.
As the ocean turns over (every ~5000 years), it brings that acidity down to depth where it can react with various forms of alkalinity that are at down there (mafic rock at the bottom of the ocean, sediment, etc), partially neutralizing it. It takes about 20 cycles (very slow) to do this, so ~100k years to return to a pre-industrial level. The pre-industrial ppm is defined mostly by biology.
A more complicated treatment of the carbon cycle: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/TAR-03.pdf
You must think of the Earth more as a process than a fixed thing. Thinking about this system in terms of feedback loops may be more helpful here.
Drastically increasing C02 levels affects several feedback loops in the system, essentially transitioning it to a state that is different to the current one.
As noted elsewhere in the comments, the Earth has gone through different eras in which the atmosphere had "high" and "low" levels of C02.
This seems to be one of the better results on the subject: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/mar/epoch-defining-study-pin...
Compare the OP's chart to the climate-population one here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/population-climate-change-1....
Population decrease won't stop global warming but global warming will lower population quicker, which will likely then be reciprocal.
Sadly it'll likely be the poorest that bear the brunt of it (high price food, expensive land to live on, poor living conditions due to heat), but hopefully we'll innovate more extreme weather resistant crops, ways to remove CO2, plant more trees etc.
There does seem to be a slight sawtooth effect. A smoother rise followed by a more rapid fall.
But if you think about what vegetation is doing, that fits. Plants slowly gather resources and build structures for reproduction. This extra mass and activity absorbs CO2.
When the plants have successfully reproduced (spread fruit and seeds) the most efficient strategy is to quickly discard the reproductive support structure and processes that are no longer required. So the CO2 intake falls rapidly.
Autumn leaves falling are one of many symptoms of this, though decaying vegetation also releases CO2
How to grow fresh air | Kamal Meattle https://youtu.be/gmn7tjSNyAA?t=11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_p...
On a second thought, indoor DIY growbox is probably can be considered as such device.
> Atmospheric CO2 concentrations (ppm) derived from in situ air measurements at Mauna Loa, Observatory, Hawaii.
> Atmospheric CO2 concentrations (ppm) derived from in situ air measurements at Mauna Loa, Observatory, Hawaii.
The automatic recalibration often just takes the smoothed minimum during the last 24 hours or so and calls that 400.
At least that's the ones I've seen.
See https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
> The observatory is surrounded by many miles of bare lava, without any vegetation or soil. This provides an opportunity to measure “background” air, also called “baseline”” air, which we define as having a CO2 mole fraction representative of an upwind fetch of hundreds of km. Nearby emission or removal of CO2 typically produces sharp fluctuations, in space and time, in mole fraction. These fluctuations get smoothed out with time and distance through turbulent mixing and wind shear. A distinguishing characteristic of background air is that CO2 changes only very gradually because the air has been mixed for days, without any significant additions or removals of CO2. Another common word for emissions is “sources”, and for removals, “sinks”.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...
> Volcanoes emit carbon dioxide in two ways: during eruptions and through underground magma. Carbon dioxide from underground magma is released through vents, porous rocks and soils, and water that feeds volcanic lakes and hot springs. Estimates of global carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes have to take both erupted and non-erupted sources into account.
But there's still logistics problems when you have to evacuate the facility or the power supply is disrupted. Or is it somehow not an issue?
https://skepticalscience.com/why-global-warming-can-accelera...
> The seasonal cycle of highs and lows (small peaks and valleys) is driven by Northern Hemisphere summer vegetation growth, which reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide, and winter decay, which increases it.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
(I assume it has to do with prevailing wind and weather in Hawaii more than AC)
Though, if you near a large CO2 source (e.g. a city) it can be 100ppm+ higher (just staring at some CO2 meters right now).
> The Keeling Curve also shows a cyclic variation of about 6 ppmv each year corresponding to the seasonal change in uptake of CO2 by the world's land vegetation. Most of this vegetation is in the Northern hemisphere where most of the land is located. From a maximum in May, the level decreases during the northern spring and summer as new plant growth takes CO2 out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. After reaching a minimum in September, the level rises again in the northern fall and winter as plants and leaves die off and decay, releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere.
First of all the manipulation of the graph to make it look like there is massive changes going on in the atmosphere.
You have to see it in true perspective.
For instance represent all the components 100 % on a wall as 100 inches ( A little over 8 feet high)
21 percent of oxygen in our atmosphere would take up 21 inches
Carbon Dioxide at 421 PARTS PER MILLION is actually 0.04 percent To represent this we need a little less than one millimeter (about 1/25) of an inch
That 280 ppm to 421 ppm jump that looks so frightening on their graphs is actually about 1/7 of a millimeter of a scale of the atmosphere over 8 feet tall
water vapor in the atmosphere has a much greater heating and cooling effect.
They have convinced millions of people that carbon dioxide is some kind of dangerous pollutant that we must control by giving them control over our activities and travel.
In fact carbon dioxide is an essential component for plants (a plant food) In fact many green houses go to a lot of trouble to keep pumping up carbon dioxide levels up to 1500 ppm because it results in lush growth and is absorbed by the plants resulting in higher yields.
What are you arguing about exactly? You are saying that CO2 isnt contributing to global warming?
* data source on x-axis changes at 1958
* y-axis does not begin at 0
Fundamentally dishonest for the purpose of manipulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1mjG_F8ppw
another great site about CO2
That's satire, right?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+has+the+global+temp...
You didn't make a point, so there is no argument to be made here.
Not saying you're wrong, but from the quantum I know (senior level undergrad), that's not "basic". Could you explain the "three atom" bit at an undergrad level?
Molecules with three atoms that are not considered greenhouse gases include:
Ozone (O3): While ozone does absorb some solar radiation, it's primarily involved in blocking ultraviolet light from the Sun, rather than acting as a greenhouse gas in the way that CO2, CH4, or N2O do.
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2): Although it's a significant air pollutant and plays a role in smog formation, it is not primarily considered a greenhouse gas.
Nitric Oxide (NO): Like NO2, nitric oxide is more involved in air pollution and is not considered a greenhouse gas.
Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2): This compound is more known for its reactive properties and is not considered a greenhouse gas.
Carbon Monoxide (CO): While carbon monoxide can have indirect effects on global warming by reacting with other substances in the atmosphere, it is not itself considered a significant greenhouse gas.
Iodine Trichloride (ICl3): This is a more exotic example and not commonly found in the atmosphere. It is not a greenhouse gas.
The GP's somewhat cryptic statement about 3 atoms is explained better here:
https://climatescienceteaching.org/lesson/infrared-spectrosc...
Monatomic gases and diatomic molecules made of identical atoms (e.g. O2, N2) are not "active" with regard to infrared radiation. They are transparent to it. Almost all other molecules are "IR active," meaning that they can absorb IR radiation in ways that are characteristic of their vibrational modes. This includes the well known greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Greenhouse gases are those IR active molecules that have a significant residence time in the atmosphere and can thus partially trap IR radiation emitted from the Earth's surface.
Some substances are IR active but are not usually classified as greenhouse gases because they quickly break down in the environment. Other substances are IR active but not counted among greenhouse gases because they have a low vapor pressure and do not significantly make it into the atmosphere.
However, that leaves two that are: ozone (O3) and NO2 Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2). Are you saying these are in fact greenhouse gases?
https://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/feature-20110403.html
Tropospheric ozone (O3) is the third most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Ozone absorbs infrared radiation (heat) from the Earth's surface, reducing the amount of radiation that escapes to space.
Nitrogen dioxide is infrared active and absorbs IR re-radiated from the Earth, as seen in the spectral plots available here:
https://vpl.astro.washington.edu/spectra/no2.htm
However, its short atmospheric residence time means that its emissions have little heat-trapping ability, so it is rarely considered as a greenhouse gas:
https://web.viu.ca/krogh/chem302/residence%20time%20of%20atm...
https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Sinc...:
Maybe it is bad, who knows, but it sure seems better than if the interglacial would have ended and the temp would drop 10°C in the next few hundred years then another 10°C in thousand years and then a 90k year long ice age or something. You may or may not remember the warnings about the coming ice age.
Overall the chance that human caused CO2 will case some kind of mass extinction due to warming is about as high as that a random ice age that should have started already but didn't (and we dont know why), causes a mass extinction.
A degree in 20 years is not “a tiny bit” in this aggregated form. That’s why the ice age scenario you suggest is also bad. There is little evidence that scenario is happening right now though.
https://www.steampoweredfamily.com/the-greenhouse-effect-exp...
An experiment for children isn't going o add anything of value here. Labor or in this case kitchen experiment do not model the real wold. And Correlation does not imply causation.
And finally when you establish a correlation, it does not have to be linear i.e. more of X does not mean it must case more of Y. Complex systems that are in some kind of balance often produce their own counter effect to change. This is the primary reason why such a stable balance could even form over long periods of time. The self correction properties of the whole system is very much a requirement for the balance to exists in a complex system like the climate.
There's a cousin to your comment with a guy refusing to accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
It can be a greenhouse gas in one system or under some conditions and not in another system.
Just like ozone is considered pollution on grown level and its UV radiation shield high up.
>ozone is considered pollution on grown level and its UV radiation shield high up
This is not even a false dichotomy.
As in "everyone"?
We have the very accurate direct measurement for a while and the most alarming part of this in this recent direct measurement era. I feel that such questions like yours miss the rather obvious point here. How do you feel about CO2 going up ~50% since we started direct measurements?
I still use ebikes because more convenient in SF, but there's no way I could Terrapass each flight reasonably now. Too many of them.
This is actually pretty fortunate that the best way to deal with the problem is personal enrichment. One of the few things in life where all incentives align.
It's sad that I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or not because I've had people sincerely say that. BP really won their gamble on feigning interest in carbon footprints.
Yeah you could apply pressure on those companies. But that would cause gas prices to skyrocket. And nothing else would provoke Americans into actually getting out guillotines than $15/gallon gas.
I don't know what your friend says but I imagine it was along the lines of "it's not your fault! 80% of carbon emissions are due to these 5 oil producers!", conveniently ignoring the fact that it's ordinary people buying the oil...
Still, you can't fix this by hoping people and companies will care. We probably have to force them with laws. So voting is about all you can really do on a global scale.
Long story short:
- These 'few companies' are part of the '100 companies produce 70% of emissions' statistic. This is true, but it's oil companies and governments on the list. Their emissions are driven by the demand by you - the consumer.
- Behavioral changes do matter. It normalizes (and then, in the futures, put's pressure for) sustainable behavior throughout society which is needed;
- Ebikes are great, more efficient (in terms of CO₂ emissions) than normal bikes.
- Please consider removing your flight emissions, then you'll truly appreciate the real cost of flying.Yeah, it helped that I mostly use bikes and ebikes. I think it's like a 10-15% increase in flight cost with Terrapass (I bought aggregate per year, but you can do per flight) for something like SFO<->LAX so that's manageable though unpleasant. But there's not that much reason to do that since it's apparently not real.
Besides, while you say this on HN, the top comments are often how China etc. are the problem. So if they're going to be the problem how does it matter if I fly some.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322230859/http://blogs.tele...
"Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP): ……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."
Good thing I followed the author's lead: "If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. "
And that's a good source for this?
https://www.scribd.com/document/23678362/Climate-Gate-Emails
Can't verify it's unaltered (how would I?) but it's 261 pages and the first page reads like it's raw emails. That seems like a plausible length for ~1000 emails, assuming quite a few are very short. Not sure if it's organized so that it's easy to follow email chains.
Climate change skeptics seem to share around some other PDFs, but they're all heavily edited and contain only a small part of the total set of stolen data, often not even very many complete emails, just parts of them, as far as I can find. They seem to have no trouble getting access to them and are keen to share excerpts, which appear to survive just fine—reddit, internet archive, their PDFs are everywhere—but not the whole thing.
Also here's the wikipedia article about this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c.... I think Scott Alexander was right when he pointed out that scientists are willing to say pretty unpopular things in anonymous polls, but the vast majority still report, even anonymously that they believe in human caused global warming
A better anonymous scientist poll would be: Will human sources cause catastrophic warming or results by 2100?
I don't expect global warming to kill me or render the earth uninhabitable, but things aren't looking very sustainable right now and I think most scientists if polled would say we aren't currently doing enough to address the problem.
I think exactly zero humans are qualified to give expert opinion to that question right now. That would require both mastery of climatology, economics, and public policy. I think this makes a great question for a team, but not a great expert poll question.
BTW, does anyone even have an estimate of what net zero carbon by 2100 would cost?
1) Climate is an extremely complicated phenomenon 2) It is extremely difficult to model beyond a limited time frame. 3) The models we have, running on the most powerful, purpose built, computers rely on massive aggregations because there are otherwise too many interactions to handle. These aggregations are too large to be reasonably interpreted. 4) There is a large industry of well paid scientists, researchers, and policymakers who have built careers on Climate Change. Alarming news keeps them in a job, so they have an incentive to bias towards worst case outcomes. " It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair 5. Efficient and clean technology is worthy of pursuing regardless of its climate impacts. We can do more for the planet creating market based solutions in those directions than trying to manage CO2 directly.
Finally, I must acknowledge the Yale paper and climate scientists who have criticized his work. Rather than fire from the bushes, they should debate Koonin directly. He isn't a Fox News kook, if anything his credentials are superior to theirs.
Remember, one of the oldest ruse of charlatans is promising they can change the weather.
Remember, one of the oldest ruse of climate-change deniers is to equate weather and climate.
Do you believe that Koonin wants a climate catastrophe?
If a person could be so monumentally blindsided to ignore a threat that will not only harm themselves, but everyone they know and care about, then could not others be too, e.g. Climate scientists?
Another question;
Accepting Climate Change as presented by the IPCC, how do we resolve the problem of the major oil producing states like Russia and Saudi Arabia refusing to give up the oil wealth which allows them to exist as they do, and the developing world states from consuming it? Green conversions are not feasible for large segments of the world population in anu useful time frame.
The net zero policies being advocated by the G7 nations are very expensive and handwave away big problems with "batteries will get cheaper, and the tech will improve" but they fail hard if thar doesn't turn out.
If we are really concerned about CO2 driven climate change the best solution is next gen nuclear power and mitigation strategies. Make electricity so cheap that no one will want fossil fuels if they can avoid it. Yes, they just started talking about nuclear power, but it's late. James Hansen was talking about it 20 years ago, it's not a surprise.
Man do I wish debate would disappear from the public sphere. Winning a debate means you were better at debating, not that your science was more sound.
> A New Book Manages to Get Climate Science Badly Wrong [0]
Talking about models doesn't change the graph in the article, nor the heat records.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-book-manage...
Market based solutions won’t be enough. We are very lucky that clean electricity is cheap. But there some emissions that will never switch because of economics. Airlines are a good example, where fossil fuel will be always cheaper than green alternatives. We will have to force them by raising fossil prices with carbon tax or by banning them. Some would call the former market based but that isn’t what they mean.
Great spin here, almost didn't catch that. Academic papers from teams of scientists cannot be dismissed for simply not debating face to face.