Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Burning All Fossil Fuels Would Scorch Earth, Says Study (phys.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.

mspohr quotes a report from Phys.Org: A new study published in the Journal Nature Climate Change shows our precarious climate condition: "Using up all known fossil fuel reserves would render Earth even more unlivable than scientists had previously projected, researchers said on Monday. Average temperatures would climb by up to 9.5 degrees Celsius (17 degrees Fahrenheit) -- five times the cap on global warming set at climate talks in Paris in December, they reported. In the Arctic region -- already heating at more than double the global average -- the thermometer would rise an unimaginable 15 C to 20 C." This would make most of Earth uninhabitable to humans (although the dinosaurs seemed to do fine with it 65 million years ago). The report also stated that if fossil fuel trends go unchanged, ten times the 540 billion tons of carbon emitted since the start of industrialization would be reached near the end of the 22nd century. For comparison, "older models had projected that depleting fossil fuel reserves entirely would heat the planet by 4.3 C to 8.4 C. The new study revises this to between 6.4 C and 9.5 C," writes Phys.Org.

6 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. Re:of course it will burn.... IF by alzoron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't worry, I'm sure all your answers will be answered if you $32 to access the full text of the article. Then again maybe it won't and the study is complete bullshit and you'll have spent that money for nothing.

    We seriously need a shift in the way we share scientific data with each other. The system we have now is broken.

  2. Re:This was published in Nature? by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Err, the "if nothing changed" scenario was kind of the point. And people modded this idiot up?

  3. Gets popcorn... by wbr1 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Cue the drama and fight.

    A serious question about the squabble. Even if GW is not AGW, even if GW is not real, why should we not as a species work to reduce our impacts everywhere?

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
    1. Re:Gets popcorn... by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The greatest scam of the 20th century was convincing people that selfishness is rationality. This is just flagrantly wrong. From the start of the enlightenment rationality was the driving force- but no enlightenment thinker would be so stupid as to think that rationality means not considering emotional considerations and certainly not dismissing considerations like empathy or caring about other people.

      In fact, quite the opposite. Not acting with empathy, not caring about other lives is absolutely IRRATIONAL thinking. It's flagrantly NOT rational. See contrary to what the Randians like to claim - there is not nor can there ever be such a thing as a rational motivation. Motivations, by definition, are emotions - hence ALL motivations are NOT rational. Rationality is not useful in the least for selecting motivations - in the same way you probably shouldn't ask a fish to select between two baloon designs - it has absolutely no useful reference frame to compare them. Selfishness and greed are not rational motivations - they are emotions. Pretending they are not emotions is a deceit intended to make them look more acceptable compared to other motivations like compassion. But there is no truth to that, compassion is an emotional motivation, greed is an emotional motivation. They are both nothing but emotions. Rationality has nothing to do with either.
      Rationality is a tool which greatly improves your odds of actually achieving your motivation, but it can never define what your motivations are nor can it select between them because it is utterly incapable of understanding anything about the concept of "motivations" since all motivations are emotions - the one thing that rationality can never be.

      The closest overlap comes in working out how pursuing different motivations is likely to affect yourself - and since it will always and invariably harm yourself not to care about others (even if most people do not realize this), it is therefore utterly irrational to pursue those motivations.

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  4. Re:of course it will burn.... IF by Jason+Levine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Photosynthesis only removes carbon from the atmosphere for a short period of time. The plants eventually die and decay. When they do, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. The problem is that all of this carbon was locked out of the usual carbon cycle by being buried deep underground (in the form of coal or oil). We're pulling it out of the ground, burning it, and putting it back into the normal carbon cycle. The only way to restore the carbon cycle to the normal (pre-industrial age) amounts of carbon would be to bury it again - an endeavor that would either be highly expensive (use some sort of atmospheric scrubber to remove the carbon and then pump it deep into the Earth) or would take millions of years (wait for the same process that formed the oil in the first place).

    --
    My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
  5. Re:of course it will burn.... IF by ComputerGeek01 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The plants eventually die and decay. When they do, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.

    You do realize that carbon is not a gas, right? And that it happily bonds with A LOT of things other than oxygen? Also, dead plants don't break down into a gaseous state, any one with a compost pile can show you that. Some is given back into the atmosphere as CO2 and methane when the plants die, but not all of it. We can sequester a notable amount of CO2 as soil through decaying plant matter in a relatively short period of time (as in months given the right conditions).