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

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.

Comments

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[ssam]

" In the absence of global mitigation actions, five trillion tonnes of carbon (5 EgC), corresponding to the lower end of the range of estimates of the total fossil fuel resource" i.e. assuming we take no action and keep burning fossil fuels at the current rates. From the time scales talked about on the first page, it looks like they assume burning it over the next couple of hundred years. Maybe some one want to give the full article a read?

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[alzoron]

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.

Re:I always thought we'd go the way of the dinosau

[wonkey_monkey]

What, get smaller and grow feathers?

Re:Circle Of Life

[lobiusmoop]

Nope, 'Dino sludge' was a one-shot deal. On the timescales needed for new fossil fuel, the sun will have died to the extent that Earth CO2 levels will have dropped below the level needed to sustain plant life (and thus animal life).

Re:This was published in Nature?

[Viol8]

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

Gets popcorn...

[wbr1]

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?

Re:Gets popcorn...

[silentcoder]

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.

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[Yoda222]

The article makes absolutely NO MENTION of time frame

Absolutely no mention, except for the six mentions of time frame in the article: "by year 2300", "in 2300" (twice), "during the 2100-2300 period" (twice), "to the year 2300", plus 3 mentions of the 2100 time frame. And I stopped to count before even reaching the end of the first page (out of 6)

Re:of course it will burn....

[Gavagai80]

At the current rate there is no way we would last a single millenium on the current reserves.

Considering the rate at which new reserves are discovered as it becomes profitable to look for them in more difficult places, it wouldn't surprise me if we could find enough fossil fuels to last a millennium. That would of course make the Earth considerably hotter than this projection.

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[stealth_finger]

It also says in the summary

ten times the 540 billion tons of carbon emitted since the start of industrialization would be reached near the end of the 22nd century.

Re:Survivable != Unlivable?

[Rei]

Hey, I live in Iceland, where the average January low is -3C and the average July high is 13C. Such warming would make us the new California. Bring it on ;) I own some land, you can start booking your timeshares now.

It's funny, when you hear people talking about forestry here, they talk about things as if they only apply to our current climate. They plant douglas fir, sitka spruce, etc, trees that can become true giants in the right climate, but insist that they'll stay (comparatively) short and grow slowly because our climate is too cool for their optimal growth. Yes, our current climate, but these are trees that can live for much of a millennium. Heat up the country 4-5 degrees and you've turned the climate into that of coastal Washington / British Columbia where they reach their record heights; we have similar sun, soil, precipitation, summer/winter temperature differences, etc (windier, but that's in large part due to the shortage of trees).

Iceland once even had redwood forests. Washington/British Columbia species are not going to stay short forever if the climate keeps warming.

Re:Circle Of Life

[Marxist Hacker 42]

300-400 million years to form supposedly. The Oregon Rainforest Coal Deposits tell a different story- they're only a few feet down, possibly two or three millenia old, and are constantly replenished by the living forest sitting on top of them.

Re:Why believe the models?

[Rei]

Models being too extreme? Hardly.

Forecast: 1990 IPCC sea level rise predictions vs. actuality
Forecast: 1988 Hansen temperature predictions vs. actuality (Scenario B was described as most likely)
Forecast: IPCC temperature predictions vs. actuality vs. contrarian models
Backtest: IPCC AR1 sea ice loss models vs. actual

Temperatures are tracking, on long running average, right on what has been forecast. Sea level rise is well on the high end. As it stands, our arctic sea ice models predict significantly less loss than we actually see (we're not very good with sea ice right now, and this is well acknowledged by the IPCC).

I know there's been this contrarian myth circulating claiming that climate models predicted warming that never occurred. There's a nice, well-referenced debunking of it here.

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[Jason Levine]

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).

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[budgenator]

Firstly, "Purchase article full text and PDF $32", fuck that shit, if those whoremongers really believed that my actions was going to destroy the world their Greatgrandchildern need to live in, they would be paying me to read it!

Secondly,

An approximately linear relationship between global warming and cumulative CO2 emissions is known to hold up to 2 EgC emissions on decadal to centennial timescales7, 8, 9, 10, 11; however, in some simple climate models the predicted warming at higher cumulative emissions is less than that predicted by such a linear relationship8. The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon

Every other modeler since Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, and especialy Svante Arrhenius uses logarithmic relationship

if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.Svante Arrhenius

These guys are claiming the entire body of Climatological "Settled Science" is wrong and they are just throwing it out there like a bunch of assholes trolling click-bait; at least on Facebook the click-bait trolls give you some side-boob or camel-toed yoga-pants.

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[AlterEager]

Secondly,

An approximately linear relationship between global warming and cumulative CO2 emissions is known to hold up to 2 EgC emissions on decadal to centennial timescales7, 8, 9, 10, 11; however, in some simple climate models the predicted warming at higher cumulative emissions is less than that predicted by such a linear relationship8. The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon

Every other modeler since Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, and especialy Svante Arrhenius uses logarithmic relationship

if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.Svante Arrhenius

These guys are claiming the entire body of Climatological "Settled Science" is wrong and they are just throwing it out there like a bunch of assholes trolling click-bait; at least on Facebook the click-bait trolls give you some side-boob or camel-toed yoga-pants.

You're confusing two different things -- Fourier and Arrhenius (and everyone else) say that there is a logarithmic relationship between the increase in CO2 concentration and the increase in temperature.

This paper (as do many others) claims that there is a (near) linear relationship between emissions and temperature.

That's because doubling the amount we emit will more than double the atmospheric concentration, as the oceans will be taking up a smaller part of what we emit. Look for articles that talk about the TCRE "transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions", e.g. Le Duc et al 2015

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[ComputerGeek01]

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).

Some other sources

[XXongo]

This article summary is insanely sensationalistic.The article itself is nowhere near this sensational.

Here is the press release from the University of Victoria:
www.communications.uvic.ca/releases/tip.php?date=23052016

and here are some sources that discuss the paper without quite as much in the way of scare words and hype:
www.reportingclimatescience.com/2016/05/23/unmitigated-emissions/
www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2016/05/23/uvic-researcher-models-worst-case-climate-change.html

Re:of course it will burn.... IF

[Sique]

I can't see any support for your argument that Germany was increasing coal sourcing.

By 2015, the growing share of renewable energy in the national electricity market (26% in 2014, up from 4% in 1990) and the government's mandated CO2 emission reduction targets (40% below 1990 levels by 2020; 80% below 1990 levels by 2050) have increasingly curtailed previous plans for new, expanded coal power capacity.

... taken verbatim from the source you cite.

A few month ago I looked through all available data for Germany's coal plants, and I found that since 1997, no new coal plant has been licensed, and all coal plants that are under construction now were already licensed before 1997. And all of the current coal plants under construction are to replace older coal plants, but will not increase total capacity.