Alaska's Permafrost Is Thawing (cnbc.com)

Henry Fountain reports via The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages. But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state. Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter -- plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities. In Alaska, nowhere is permafrost more vulnerable than here, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a vast, largely treeless landscape formed from sediment brought down by two of the state's biggest rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. Temperatures three feet down into the frozen ground are less than half a degree below freezing. This area could lose much of its permafrost by midcentury.

Comments

Time to plant trees

[ClickOnThis]

Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.

Re:Time to plant trees

[quantaman]

Yes, and its part of a natural cycle. The polar caps on Mars are also melting, but we seem to be peaking and cycling back into the cold half again for another 11 or 22 or 28 or 88 years. There are several cycles that sometimes harmonize to cause the extremes.

Solar cycle extremes as a seasonal predictor of Atlantic-Basin tropical cyclones

FTA:
Minimum sunspot years and the AMO index can combine to explain more than 54 percent of the variations in total tropical cyclones and nearly 46 percent of the variation in tropical cyclone days. Solar cycle extremes should be considered for more accurate seasonal tropical cyclone predictions.

So what does that have to do with the permafrost melting, or even global warming more generally?

Did you just find a peer reviewed article talking about sunspots and figured no one would realize it didn't support your argument?

Re:Time to plant trees

[MightyMartian]

It has nothing to do with anything. It's just a string of sentences strung together, because pseudo-skeptics need to have some sort of response, no matter how idiotic or false the claim.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Re:Time to plant trees

[ClickOnThis]

You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.

Re:Time to plant trees

[DontBeAMoran]

PI IS EXACTLY THREE!

Re:Time to plant trees

[philmarcracken]

Humans can't eat trees. We need arable land to farm on. They also decompose so you need to keep planting them year on year.

It's like us humans are in a boat on the sea, and we have a bit of rain every now and then in the boat, but it evaporates. So we decided to hook up a bunch of industrial pumps to the side and just shit in water from the ocean. And every time I read about trees, its a tiny ass bucket scooping a pitiful amount of water out of this boat. Meanwhile their get in their ice cars and heat their homes using a fuckload of coal power while voting against nuclear.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Jeremi]

It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Cool, but then you have to figure out how to power those machines. Presumably you'd need to use renewable (or at least nuclear) power for them, since otherwise they'd be putting more CO2 into the air, likely at a faster rate than they were taking it out of the air. How much power would such a machine require to remove a given amount of CO2? Are we currently capable of creating a CO2-removing machine that is more power-efficient than a tree? I have my doubts about that.

Re: Time to plant trees

[FunkSoulBrother]

You're supposed to use the re-usable cloth bags

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

Cool, but then you have to figure out how to power those machines.

Solar and wind. This isn't rocket science.

Are we currently capable of creating a CO2-removing machine that is more power-efficient than a tree?

Trees don't permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere. If they did then there wouldn't be any CO2 for them. Also, please don't argue that animals are supplying the CO2 they need because animal-life is a recent development compared to plant-life.

What we have done is removed a fuckload of buried carbon and propelled it into the atmosphere. If we wanted to involve trees, it would be planting a huge amount of trees, uprooting them at their prime and then burying them deep underground. The better option is to use machines to capture CO2 and then use chemistry to split it into carbon and oxygen. We can make various things with these but the most space efficient would be to make diamonds and release the oxygen. Considering we've released over a trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, space should be a consideration.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

But until we have such machines...

Actually, we have already invented the machines we need to capture CO2. We have the machines we need, we just need to build them.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Mal-2]

Actually, we have already invented the machines we need to capture CO2. We have the machines we need, we just need to build them.

And power them. That's going to remain a sticking point unless and until we have fusion.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Barsteward]

Here is a possibility as a start https://www.fastcompany.com/40...

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

And power them. That's going to remain a sticking point unless and until we have fusion.

We have plenty of power from the sun and the wind, dummy. Worst case scenario, we power them with nuclear.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Mal-2]

If we have plenty of solar and wind energy, then why are we still burning fossil fuels and amplifying the problem in the first place?

Re:Time to plant trees

[religionofpeas]

It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

A better first step would be to turn off the machines that actively add carbon to the air.

Re: Time to plant trees

[Anonymous Coward]

Because coal jobs. Here in Switzerland power is pretty much 0% fossil fuels and the huge public transportation system is mostly electric.

Re:Time to plant trees

[amiga3D]

It's time to start preparing for the inevitable warming of the planet. We've got some time but I'd start by banning any new construction in Florida and other low lying areas. Even by the most optimistic view the Paris Accords aren't going to do much, if any, good. It'll keep warming gradually for decades.

Re:Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.

That depends on where it's going. If the area is very dry, it won't support trees. You have to work your way up from scrub, kudzu, something hardy like that. If it is moist, bamboo is better. It grows biomass faster than trees, and there are several varieties useful as building materials. Cutting the bamboo down and building stuff out of it means carbon sequestration, just like trees except faster.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like turning off the life support before the patient can breathe on their own.

Also, YOU are a machine that actively adds carbon into the air. So turn yourself off first.

Re:Time to plant trees

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

You mean the machines also known as "trees"?

Re:Time to plant trees

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Such a device could plausibly use solar heat. Build it in Nevada or something. There's more than enough desert there.

Re:Time to plant trees

[K. S. Kyosuke]

We can make various things with these but the most space efficient would be to make diamonds and release the oxygen.

...what? We have the ability to make gigatonnes of diamonds every year? Why has nobody told me?

Re: Time to plant trees

[fortfive]

Op probably meant biomass in its most technical sense: mass of biological material, as opposed to the vernacular sense of biomass conversion fuel.

Re:Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

Worst case scenario, we power them with nuclear.

That pretty much is the worst case. It also makes zero sense because wind is cheaper.

Re:Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

It's like when I discovered the house I was renting had blackberry bushes outside. "Great!" I thought, "Free blackberries!" And when the blackberries ripened I went outside to pick them. An hour later I had a small bowl of blackberries, but I still had to wash them and my fingers were sore from numerous thorn pricks. The next day I just went to the store and bought a box of blackberries for a couple dollars. It was a much more efficient use of my time and resources to get the same end product.

When I was a kid living in Aptos, I used to go with my mother to pick blackberries along the railroad tracks. We'd get backpacks full of berries for a couple hours' work tops. Later, we moved to Capitola, and we used to pick berries in a big open field on 41st Ave, out behind the KFC. Again, backpacks full. Even at the time a small container of ripe berries was regularly $2; today it's typically around $5. Then we'd take them home and make cobblers out of them. We couldn't actually afford to go out and eat cobbler in restaurants, but we could afford to go pick fifty to a hundred dollars' worth of berries.

Maybe you're a shitty berry-picker, maybe your berry patch isn't very good, or maybe your story is just bullshit.

Re:Time to plant trees

[religionofpeas]

Also, YOU are a machine that actively adds carbon into the air. So turn yourself off first.

No, I need to be around to say "I told you so".

Re:Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

Trees don't permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere. If they did then there wouldn't be any CO2 for them.

A portion of the carbon that trees remove from the atmosphere is sequestered. That's a simple fact. Even in the rain forest, that's true. However, it's most true in evergreen forests, because the rate of falls determines (in part) whether decomposition is aerobic or not, and aerobic decomposition releases less of the stored carbon, returning more of it to the soil.

Re:Time to plant trees

[jellomizer]

There is so much wasted space pointing upward, that could be used for solar energy collection or improved tree growth.

Cities have many square miles of ugly black tar roofs that could be collecting solar energy. They are fields that are laying fallow that could be reforested.

These are not things that are impossible for even modest governments, but we are lacking global leadership who is willing to say they will fund these projects and attack the problem on many angles.

Do you want to get Republicans involved. Well stop calling them uneducated hicks, start explaining how solar energy is a good way to be independent of these government controlled power plants and where you are responsible for your own energy. Business can be shown how this can lower costs over a longer time. Religious people just explain that solar energy from they sky is from God, while oil and coal is from the ground closer to hell. Have policies where you can sell back your power to the grid if you want too, or just disconnect from it completely. Avoid sob stories such as polar bears, when being told that their views are wrong for both liberal and conservatives they are not going to go, oh gee I have been a dufus all my life, Ill change. They are going to dig deeper and protect their stance and beliefs.

Re: Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

Correct. The word for that is "feedstock", not "biomass", although there are processes for which any biomass is a viable feedstock. The ABE process springs to mind as being relevant here.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Ol Olsoc]

It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

You mean the machines also known as "trees"?

Trees are great things to have around the place. I'll always support planting them, and enjoy them. But at best, they are carbon neutral. Any carbon they might pull from the atmosphere is temporarily stored, then released back to the atmosphere after they die and decay. We might think of the standard rotting process as extreme slow burning, and some of the more wet decays as methane production.

Probably the best approach is to attempt to slow releasing of sequestered carbon from ages past, and call it a lesson learned as we deal with what is happening.

Because you just never know what will happen. If we were to go on a global jag to sequester carbon dioxide - and don't forget methane - if the sun goes on one of it's periodic turndowns, or more likely we enter a period of high volcanic activity, we could inadvertently create problems on the cold side of average global temperature. Carbon dioxide, as the longest lived of the so-called greenhouse gases, is actually a critical component of our atmosphere, and we should trifle with it as little as possible.

Re:Time to plant trees

[aardvarkjoe]

But at best, they are carbon neutral. Any carbon they might pull from the atmosphere is temporarily stored, then released back to the atmosphere after they die and decay.

Not if you take measures to prevent their decay after they die.

After all, that's how all this carbon got into the ground in the first place, so it's obviously not impossible.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Ol Olsoc]

Do you want to get Republicans involved. Well stop calling them uneducated hicks, start explaining how solar energy is a good way to be independent of these government controlled power plants and where you are responsible for your own energy.

I love how you make this attempt to say that non-republicans are causing republicans to rebel because non-republicans are so mean.

That is like arguing that you can get someone to kill themselves by telling them they are stupid, and that gravity is real, so they say No it isn't, and then jump off a cliff because you contradicted them.

You are going to have to explain why an apparent fatal flaw is a good thing, because your concept is a perfect way to take advantage of people. Regardless I've been called a lot of names by deniers and others - so what? I've never driven off a cliff just to show them they are wrong.

No, there are three things causing denialism.

First is that there is the fact that a number of our politicians are receiving a goodly amount of money from the groups who's activities are releasing sequestered CO2. They then do these contributor's bidding. With enough politicians owned by the groups, it forms a pretty powerful voting bloc.

Second, this is a long term thing, performed by the fizzy stuff in my Pepsi. How can that work? It's hard to convince people that an invisible gas is causing problems, especially when they can be reassured by a politician bringing a snowball to the podium to make a speech that the snowball's existence disproves the greenhouse effect.

Third, as my conservative friends who are slowly coming around to the idea that yes, it is real, and yes we are involved - living in the Northeast of the US - they like that it is warmer, and that we don't have as much snow, and that those 70 degree days in February are really nice. They don't care about ocean levels, they don't live at the beach. Same with all the other effects. So many people just don't care what is happening outside of their personal area.

Re:Time to plant trees

[hey!]

Well, there actually are other geoengineering possibilities. One proposal is fertilizing the Antarctic Oceans with iron to generate massive algal blooms. The problem with that is that it has *other* consequences, like destroying the ecosystem in the part of the ocean where you do it. But the big advantage is that it's cheap, and it'd probably work, at the costs of turning large swathes of the oceans into toxic muck.

While planting an individual tree isn't expensive, planting enough trees to offset human carbon emissions is not. It's a matter of marginal costs; at some point the marginal cost of removing the next ton of carbon with a tree is less than the marginal cost of eliminating a ton of human emissions. Planting forests is probably on the list of things we'll need to do, but at some point you've got to start making dumping carbon in the air more expensive, if you want the most cost effective response.

And that's the problem; a cost effective, conservative response is going to be relatively complex, and it runs afoul of our dysfunctional political system. I think it highly likely we'll reach the precipice of an economic catastrophe and do something cheap, radical, and almost as catastrophic, like fertilizing marine algal blooms.

Re:Time to plant trees

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But at best, they are carbon neutral. Any carbon they might pull from the atmosphere is temporarily stored, then released back to the atmosphere after they die and decay.

Make biochar. You 1) sequester carbon and 2) improve agriculture. It's a win-win.

Re:Time to plant trees

[stevelinton]

Trees don't permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere. .

Depends what happens to the leaves when they fall and the wood when the tree dies. If if gets locked up in peat bogs or permafrost (or eventually oil or coal) you are fine. If it burns or decays, not so good. I haven't done the sums, but I suspect growing plants (I can quite believe that bamboo or something is better than trees) harvesting them and dumping them into old oil wells or coal mines, or somewhere else where they won't decay for a few millenia (what happens to woodchip in deep ocean sediment (assuming it's weighted down) does anyone know?) is more efficient than any current carbon extracting machinery we know about. Also the solar energy used to power the plants is not going directly into heat as it does when it hits desert or tarmac.

Re:Time to plant trees

[LynnwoodRooster]

355/113 gets you within 1 PPM.

Re:Time to plant trees

[zippthorne]

Well, until we have fission, at any rate. If you're anti-fission now, what makes you think you'll be pro-fusion when it is possible? You'll just have some other thing that we need to shoot for that conveniently lets fossil fuel companies keep operating "in the meantime" as always.

Re:Time to plant trees

[zippthorne]

I'd start by just not providing government-funded flood insurnace in coastal areas known to have a high risk of flooding. If you want to build there, fine, but you insure your own shit or live with the cost of losing your property in the next big storm. We shouldn't have been subsidizing stupid real estate decisions like that all along.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Mal-2]

We're using our fission power. Even if it's scaled up as rapidly as can be done with reasonable safety margins, demand will expand to use it all -- not that this is a bad thing, as many problems (like fossil fueled vehicles, and the shortage of fresh water) can be solved. I'm definitely not anti-fission and don't see why you think I would be. It's just that the sheer quantity of power available from fusion will mean no longer having to choose which power-intensive needs top the list: making fertilizer for farming, desalinating water, powering more industry, aiming lasers at solar sails to accelerate them toward the next star... there would be enough for all of these things and then some. Right now there isn't, and you can be sure that CO2 sequestration won't be near the top of the list when there are things that need to be done right fucking now with any increased capacity. (Not that I necessarily agree with the ranking of needs, but I'm pretty certain immediate ones will get served first in reality.)

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

You mean the machines also known as "trees"?

No.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

A better first step would be to turn off the machines that actively add carbon to the air.

That would be ideal but we have to work within government capabilities without authoritarian rule. The better first step would be to add a pollution tax. It would be onerous enough that non-polluting solutions would become the more desirable solutions from a financial standpoint. The taxes should be used to help clean up the pollution and subsidize solutions for the poor (because they cannot afford the initial investment needed).

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

If we have plenty of solar and wind energy, then why are we still burning fossil fuels and amplifying the problem in the first place?

Because we aren't taxing polluters to clean up their pollution. Change that and everyone will be switching power sources ASAP.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

I haven't done the sums, but I suspect growing plants...

Do the sums. Your argument is specious.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Ichijo]

Fossil fuels..and especially nuclear are very concentrated energy sources

False. Uranium does not naturally exist in a concentrated form, and likewise petroleum is getting more and more difficult to find, extract, and refine. Nuclear and fossil fuel advocates choose to pretend this aspect of energy generation doesn't exist.

Re:Time to plant trees

[blindseer]

If wind was cheaper then we should be able to do without wind subsidies. Every time the possibility of removing those subsidies is mentioned though the tree huggers scream. Wind power as it is now cannot survive without subsidies, subsidies from a coal and nuclear powered economy.

Smart grids and batteries won't save wind power either because they both cost money, add those and wind power isn't so cheap any more.

Oh, and nuclear has a smaller carbon footprint than wind power too. If the goal is to get cheap, carbon free (as "free" of carbon as wind anyway), reliable, and safe energy then nuclear is at the top of the list.

I'll believe the politicians are serious about a carbon free economy when I see a new nuclear power plant built in every state. Until then it's just a bunch of hot air.

Re:Time to plant trees

[blindseer]

"The better first step would be to add a pollution tax."

We have those, they are called "taxes". Everything we do produces "pollution" (if we include CO2 as pollution) and everything is taxed. Do you mean just raising tax rates?

" The taxes should be used to help clean up the pollution and subsidize solutions for the poor (because they cannot afford the initial investment needed)."

We have those too. Lots of subsidies for lights, insulation, fuel efficient cars, and on and on.

At some point we need to recognize the diminishing returns on doing more. We've already done a lot so far, at some point we need to stop doing more and go into a "maintenance mode" and just keep what we got with minor tweaks here and there as economic, technological, and other factors change. I think we met that point of diminishing returns a long time ago.

That is we hit a wall of diminishing returns if we keep this NIMBY attitude on nuclear power. We could go a long way yet with nuclear power. Barring that though we've pretty much hit a wall.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

"The better first step would be to add a pollution tax."

We have those, they are called "taxes". Everything we do produces "pollution" (if we include CO2 as pollution) and everything is taxed. Do you mean just raising tax rates?

We do not tax specifically for the volume of pollution something creates. That's what should be taxed. The tax also needs to be high enough to cover the cost of cleaning up the pollution.

At some point we need to recognize the diminishing returns on doing more.

When we reach the point where we're removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than we're putting out, that's when we can "go into maintenance mode".

That is we hit a wall of diminishing returns if we keep this NIMBY attitude on nuclear power.

Currently, nuclear power isn't very cost effective and it's very centralized which makes it a vulnerability. Distributed solar power is a better idea and reduces the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained. It won't work everywhere but insisting on perfection prevents improvement. It would be nice if the government would fund research into next gen reactors which don't have an abundance of fissile material and thus are incapable of a meltdown but those don't make weapons, so they will not fund it. It's best we do what we can to improve the situation instead of waiting for silver bullet solutions.

We could go a long way yet with nuclear power. Barring that though we've pretty much hit a wall.

We're not even close to hitting a wall. The wall isn't even in sight.

Re:Time to plant trees

[HiThere]

Well, it's not exactly coherent reasoning, but there is an orbital oscillation that is having a minor effect. (I'm not sure sun spots have anything to do with this, though, and the orbit of Mars doesn't shift it's oscillation in parallel with Earth, so the argument fails even though it's talking about a real, if minor, effect.)

Check out http://www.indiana.edu/~geol10... . But also note that I have no idea where we are in the cycle...except that based solely on that cycle we should have been re-entering an ice age during the last century. So some other effect is swamping it.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

If wind was cheaper then we should be able to do without wind subsidies. Every time the possibility of removing those subsidies is mentioned though the tree huggers scream. Wind power as it is now cannot survive without subsidies, subsidies from a coal and nuclear powered economy.

Just add a tax based on the amount money needed to clean up the pollution from each energy source. Wind will thrive because energy from fossil fuel would actually cost companies money. When we do that, we can strip all subsidies from the energy sector.

Re:Time to plant trees

[dryeo]

Not just coastal areas. There are rivers that seem to be experiencing once in a hundred year floods every decade and every time the government bails out the people living in the flood zones.

Re:Time to plant trees

[HiThere]

It may be the best argument, but it's not a good one. A better one is that people are really short-sighted, and unreasonably discount future costs. And even better argument is that the decision makers won't be the ones hurt. And an even better argument is that the decision makers won't be hurt as much, and so they'll be relatively better off.

I seem to be a bit of a cynic.

Re:Time to plant trees

[HiThere]

Planting trees is good, especially if you then bury them under anaerobic conditions where they won't be exposed for millennia. Second best is to really fireproof them and then use them in construction. Third best is convert them to acid neutralized paper and use them to print libraries. (Books don't last as long as buildings, and buildings don't last as long as well buried stuff...which will turn into coal.)

The thing is, you've got to remove the carbon from the cycle. And one generation of trees won't come near to sufficing for what's needed.

Do note, however, that the process we're discussion will take multiple centuries...and probably a large multiple. In the mean time things are likely to get a bit warm, and possibly dry. (Check out the current fires in British Columbia.)

Re:Time to plant trees

[religionofpeas]

That would be ideal but we have to work within government capabilities without authoritarian rule

Government rules from authority, so that's not a problem. You need the same rule to install your CO2-removal machines, except they would be much less efficient, so you need a lot more power.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Ol Olsoc]

But at best, they are carbon neutral. Any carbon they might pull from the atmosphere is temporarily stored, then released back to the atmosphere after they die and decay.

Not if you take measures to prevent their decay after they die.

After all, that's how all this carbon got into the ground in the first place, so it's obviously not impossible.

The great sequestration that took place in the carboniferous will almost certainly never happen again, as towards it's end Fungi emerged that could break down the lignin in the wood. So yeah, we would have to create vaults that would seal the wood off from the atmosphere, and keep it sealed off.

The scale of the project would be mind boggling. It would also be zany and ridiculous enough to have been part of a Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy chapter.

We grow trees to capture carbon then chop them down and place them in sealed vaults in order for us to put more carbon into the air from carbon that we dig out of the ground that was there already, and re-release the old carbon, then have to grow new carbon to put in the ground, forever.

Sounds legit.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

You need the same rule to install your CO2-removal machines, except they would be much less efficient, so you need a lot more power.

You seem awfully sure about that. https://www.fastcompany.com/40...

“One CO2 collector has the same footprint as a tree,” says Wurzbacher. “It takes 50 tons of CO2 out of the air every year. A corresponding tree would take 50 kilograms of the air every year. It’s a factor of a thousand. So in order to achieve the same, you would need 1,000 times less area than you would require for plants growing.” The CO2 collectors can also be used in areas that wouldn’t be suitable for agriculture, helping preserve land needed for farming, and they don’t require a water source, unlike some afforestation efforts. They can also run on renewable energy.

Re: Time to plant trees

[guruevi]

Are you sure you weren't stealing them from a farm?

Wild berry bushes are very lean and the story matches my experience. They're a lot sweeter and firmer wild than farm grown bushes, but you won't get hundreds of dollars worth, at best you'll get a cup per bush and there is no rows of them, you have a single bush amongst all sorts of other things.

Farm berry bushes have less or no thorns and the berries are bigger and the bushes are close together.

Re:Time to plant trees

[manu0601]

It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Where and how are you going to store that carbon?

Re: Time to plant trees

[hackwrench]

Wolverine's Adamantium skeleton is carbon. Our bodies are very slowly replacing the calcium in our bones and replacing it with retractable carbon. The calcium then goes to the nervous system.

Re: Time to plant trees

[hackwrench]

We love having as much energy as possible and those fossils aren't going to burn themselves.

Re: Time to plant trees

[dougdonovan]

agreed. plant trees after each forest fire. when your gas tank gets to 1/4 full...fill it up but for some reason...$...the trees dont get replaced but i know you have a full tank.

Re:Time to plant trees

[zippthorne]

I am ok with the government bulldozing the site afterward to make sure it is not a hazard*. The thing that is odious is the expectation that the government (i.e. everyone who couldn't afford a waterfront house but who nevertheless must pay taxes anyway) will make the owner whole since flood insurance companies won't take the risk, or will but for very high premiums.

* If the property is turned over to the government to be used as open space and a buffer. If the owner wants to keep the property, they can pay for the cleanup.

hint: if flood insurance companies won't take the risk or flood insurance costs "too much" maybe you shouldn't build there.

Re:Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

Nuclear would not even be a figment of your imagination without subsidies. The development, construction, insurance, operation, decommissioning and cleanup of a nuclear plant are all always state-subsidized.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

There are an infinite number of things you can do carbon but the lame option is simply to put it back in the places from which we extracted it. More fun options are making diamonds and carbon nanotubes. If we had the technology, there is enough carbon to make a space elevator. ;)

Re: Time to plant trees

[Mal-2]

At one rented house I occupied as a teen, there were bushes along the entire fence line between us and the neighbor directly to the south which produced plenty of berries for both households. I would pick enough to half-fill the extra freezer in the garage in between sessions of making pies and jam. Even during the winter they'd go through a bloom and fruit cycle. They had lots of thorns, as you say, but the insects and spiders were a better reason to wear gloves. That, and not wanting purple fingers at the end.

Re:Time to plant trees

[manu0601]

simply to put [carbon] back in the places from which we extracted it

You realize this means giving back the energy we obtained from carbon extraction, right?

Re:Time to plant trees

[amiga3D]

I remember when Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans how stupid I thought it was to rebuild those flooded areas. I thought, why not offer those ppl who lost homes new homes above sea level instead of in a swamp? Nope, they rebuilt in the same fucked up place. Idiots. They should have moved everyone out and gave it back to Lake Pontchartrain.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

You're putting it back in a hole in the ground. What were you expecting, magic?

Re:Time to plant trees

[Agripa]

Billions of solar powered self replicating machines like ... trees?

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

No, these are 1000x more effective than trees at absorbing CO2 and unlike trees, they don't release it back into the atmosphere.

Re:Time to plant trees

[lsatenstein]

Why bother.
Astronomers are saying that in roughly 2,500 years, a large set of space crap, some as big as the moon will be passing by and hitting earth. The consensus from these individuals is that the life on the earth will be wiped out.

So why worry about global warming. Genius POTUS has said it's bullshit.

Re: Time to plant trees

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Exactly the right answer, and the only answer we need.

Re:Time to plant trees

[AutodidactLabrat]

Nope
Cyanobacter

Re:Time to plant trees

[AutodidactLabrat]

"without subsidies"
Since when is any fossil fuel, and yes that means Uranium too, without subsidies?
The Anderson laws prohibit anyone from charging for the worst case insurance cost coverage for nukes
That alone is worth over 20 BILLION per year in the U.S.
Add the subsidized cost of containment and shipping rods plus...96000 years of storage and you get a rough equivalent
Now oil and gas have huge but unmentioned subsides, like the 300 BILLION PER YEAR military protection of U.S. access to foreign oil and control of that market place.
Health costs, likewise subsidized.
Want a level playing field for all energy?
Remove the cost coverage for the two oilwars and healthcare costs for coal, along with the reconditioning costs for abandoned coal / oil slag and now fracking waste and THEN talk to me about subsidies for clean energy

Re:Time to plant trees

[blindseer]

Currently, nuclear power isn't very cost effective and it's very centralized which makes it a vulnerability.

Cost effective? Nuclear power currently makes about 1/3rd of the electricity in the USA, if it's not cost effective then it seems the people running the plants didn't get that memo.

Vulnerable? Vulnerable to what? Wind? Hail? Clouds? Nuclear power reactors are in big steel and concrete structures, they are about as invulnerable as they can get. When we see naval aircraft carriers running off of wind and sun then we can talk about nuclear power being "vulnerable".

Distributed solar power is a better idea and reduces the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained.

Did you say "reduces" the infrastructure needed? What about all those batteries that people keep talking about to make wind and solar viable? Is that not "infrastructure"? Or a "smart grid"? That's infrastructure, and it doesn't exist. We have the infrastructure to make nuclear power work, it's called a "nuclear power plant" and they are relatively self sufficient. Just don't build them on fault lines and they should run for nearly a century at a time without problems. Put them on a floating platform, you know, like the US Navy does. When on water that solves a lot of "vulnerability" problems, kind of like how wind power works better on the water too, no pesky neighbors to complain.

Sure, go use solar power where it makes sense. The problem is that the places it makes sense is so small that it is nearly non-existent. Nuclear power on the other hand works well almost anywhere. If it being "vulnerable" bothers you then surround them with a bunch of well trained men with guns, kind of like how the Navy does it, such as on a military base.

It won't work everywhere but insisting on perfection prevents improvement.

Kind of like how people demand perfection from nuclear power plants before they get built? That kind of puts a damper on nuclear power too, don't you think? There's a lot of ways to improve nuclear power but people need to actually build them to learn. That includes being able to make some mistakes. Oh, and Chernobyl wasn't a "mistake" that was gross incompetence. I mean "mistake" like being allowed to make changes to a design when a flaw is discovered in a design without needed three years of review, and 50 signatures, to allow it to happen.

It would be nice if the government would fund research into next gen reactors which don't have an abundance of fissile material and thus are incapable of a meltdown but those don't make weapons, so they will not fund it.

NO! Get the government out of it. There's enough private research in this but no one in the government seems willing to let people actually build something. The nuclear power industry has been at a standstill precisely because the government has been "funding research" for the past 40 years. We have enough research, we need to build now. Oh, and that research does include reactors that don't produce weapon grade material, or make long lived fission products (at least none that isn't fuel), and are immune to a meltdown. Enough researching, time to build something.

Re:Time to plant trees

[blindseer]

Yep, that how it was done in the past. Time to stop doing that.

I keep hearing how wind and solar need government funded research to be "viable" in the future. We've been doing this for 40 or 50 years now. How much longer must this continue before we take of these training wheels and see if the industry can stay upright on its own? It seems nuclear was doing fine until the government got scared off from issuing licenses. People want to build nuclear power without the government paying them to do it. Let them do it.

It seems no one, or very few, people want to build wind or solar unless the government pays them to do it. If wind and solar is so great then why is it still a tiny fraction of our energy even after decades of subsidies? Maybe it isn't so great and it's time to stop throwing good money at it.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

Currently, nuclear power isn't very cost effective and it's very centralized which makes it a vulnerability.

Cost effective? Nuclear power currently makes about 1/3rd of the electricity in the USA, if it's not cost effective then it seems the people running the plants didn't get that memo.

There is more than just the reactor when it comes to nuclear power.

Vulnerable? Vulnerable to what?

Vulnerable to disruption of distribution. It could be a nation-state taking down your grid via internet or just a storm that knocks down a few too many trees. Either way, the entire grid goes down and that's the vulnerability behind centralized power.

Distributed solar power is a better idea and reduces the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained.

Did you say "reduces" the infrastructure needed? What about all those batteries that people keep talking about to make wind and solar viable? Is that not "infrastructure"?

Batteries would be part of the structure. You should look up the definition of infrastructure.

Re:Time to plant trees

[PlaynBass]

Already done! It's called a GOP Congress. They breathe in air, but they can not expel any noticeable gas of any kind since all human activities by definition have absolutely no effect on the climate. They also own all those CAFO GMO-bred cows that don't emit ANY methane!

Re:Time to plant trees

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Thorns in your hands from picking brambles? WTF was gp doing, grabbing the branch and trying to shake them free?

Re:Time to plant trees

[drinkypoo]

I keep hearing how wind and solar need government funded research to be "viable" in the future.

Nope. It just needs it to compete with the government funded research into extractive and/or polluting methods. I'm all for ending all energy subsidies in theory, but then... do you really want some other nation to have all the energy patents?

Re: Time to plant trees

[surd1618]

in the northwest (outside metro areas) Himalayan blackberries are incredibly abundant. most folks have enough within a block to satisfy their wants. people only go picking to make jam or wine. i wish there were some raspberries mixed in.

Re:Time to plant trees

[pots]

The idea behind capturing carbon via trees isn't the individual trees themselves, it's reforestation. Forests do permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, even if individual trees do die eventually. (assuming someone doesn't come down and chop down the forests again)

Burying the carbon is another good option, but way more expensive. I'm not aware of any real large-scale proposals for this, let alone implementations. It's hard enough at this point just to get people to acknowledge the problem - spending those kinds of resources to address it seems infeasible.

Re:Time to plant trees

[Gravis Zero]

Burying the carbon is another good option, but way more expensive. I'm not aware of any real large-scale proposals for this, let alone implementations.

The biggest issue is actually capturing the CO2 itself. We've managed to figure that out just fine: https://www.fastcompany.com/40...

Re: Time to plant trees

[VisceralLogic]

I don't know what kind of blackberry bushes drinkypoo was picking, but the Himalayan blackberries up in the Puget Sound area are abundant producers. We have a row maybe 30 feet long behind our fence that has probably a half gallon ripe every few days. The electric pole swath behind our subdivision is also covered with blackberries, and would easily match his experience.

Re:Time to plant trees

[LynnwoodRooster]

If you're working on an 8 or 16 bit processor without an FPU, 355/113 is a really good ratio to know, especially if precision is important. Used it a lot in old 8 bit (8051 based) avionics systems back in the 80s and early 90s!

Re:Time to plant trees

[KingBenny]

Nothing a nuclear winter can't solve ... so it looks like we're going the right way hah hah ... thats gonna take a lot of trees otherwise, whats the carbon footprint on the actual process of planting one tree ? how long before its big enough to actually clear what it took to be planted ? Is the planet dead by then ? my glass has never been half full, i simply can't think like that so i think like this all the time, i hear normals die from it

Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.

The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.

We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.

The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.

Re: Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet - we already fucking know. How much more research do we need ?

And how many of us have really changed our lives to a significant degree ? (Almost none)

You same lefties that can seemingly bring to a halt companies over stupid social shit can't put the pressure on your same companies to tackle these issues ?

Instead of getting mad at trump / deniers, fucking act.

Re: Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[PoopJuggler]

Why should we do it? Because the world needs less people who say, "Let someone else do it."

Re:Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[Joviex]

Oh, and your number is completely made up bullshit unless you're arguing that rats, mice and voles are still part of our feedstock.

Look up the word BIOMASS, ass.

Re: Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[Joviex]

Trump was right about one thing. Both sides fucking suck.

This is why we cant take you serious, Trump isnt right about anything.

Re:Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[hey!]

They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.

-- The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

And when that fails the next Pratchettian proviso kicks in:

he phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.

In other words most people don't want to believe change is coming, and when they can't keep that up, they don't want to believe there's anything they can do about it.

Re: Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[david_thornley]

We know that AGW is happening, and have fairly good ideas as to where it's going. Beyond that, things get iffy. It would be nice to have a better idea of the economic costs. It would be nice to have a better idea as to what will happen. It would be nice to have ideas on what to do about it.

You same lefties that can seemingly bring to a halt companies over stupid social shit

If we lefties could actually do that, rather than seeming to do it, we'd be in better shape. Got companies in mind that were forced into bankruptcy by important social concerns?

As far as acting goes, nobody here makes a measurable difference to the CO2 in the atmosphere. We're doing that collectively, and to meaningfully slow it down we need collective action. Market forces would work, if we could internalize the CO2 externalities. That's why I'm in favor of carbon taxes, and with the current President there's not a snowball's chance of them passing in the US.

Re: Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[david_thornley]

Have you looked at his approval numbers lately? He's got his deluded group of core supporters, making irrational demands out of their sense of entitlement, and pretty much nobody else.

Re:Every generation is phenomenally stupid...

[david_thornley]

I think you may just have insulted conservatives.

Re:In other climate news

[ClickOnThis]

And on the same day, he pardoned convicted ex-Sherriff Joe Arpaio, and banned transgendered people from serving in the military.

At least Bush managed to show up at a press conference for Katrina with his jacket taken off.

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

Nominations not getting through? Thank you Democrats

Good try, but Trump hasn't even nominated anyone for the posts I listed.

Unstable equilibrium

[Okian Warrior]

Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.

The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.

We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.

The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.

Every generation is phenomenally stupid about something that should be blindingly obvious.

The fact that we've dominated the environment to the degree we have should be obvious - we've gone from 2% of the land mammal biomass to 98% when you include our livestock.

We have evidence of multiple mass extinctions caused by exactly these same events:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I agree with the thought that some of the established concepts can have some bullshit in it - but that's exactly why we need repeatable research done and confirmed, and USED TO IMPROVE THINGS before we basically repeat history and ruin the planet for millions of years again.

The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.

It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.

So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?

It would only take a degree or two of variation to trigger the runaway event, but that's never happened due to variations in sun activity?

The Trump move to eliminate climate research, and to silence researchers is more than the normal level of stupid.

Every morning I read Breitbart first, then MSM (via Google News). Breitbart to find out what happened, and MSM to find out why it was Trump's fault.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[Anonymous Coward]

"why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?"

End Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost

Known as “the great dying”, this was by far the worst extinction event ever seen; it nearly ended life on Earth. The tabulate corals were lost in this period – today’s corals are an entirely different group. What caused it? A perfect storm of natural catastrophes. A cataclysmic eruption near Siberia blasted CO2 into the atmosphere. Methanogenic bacteria responded by belching out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Global temperatures surged while oceans acidified and stagnated, belching poisonous hydrogen sulfide. It set life back 300 million years.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[quantaman]

It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.

So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?

Why doesn't any positive feedback react that way? If I have a single beer that triggers a positive feedback loop where I want another beer, but it doesn't end up with me dead of alcohol poisoning, it ends up with me drunk and deciding I've had enough. An avalanche is another positive feedback, a single snowball might not do anything, but once there's enough sliding snow it starts to trigger more snow to slide.

But the result isn't snow sliding to the centre of the earth, the positive feedback of sliding snow gives out as the snow reaches the bottom of the mountain.

Global warming feedbacks aren't fundamentally different, positive feedbacks diminish in effectiveness as the system moves in their direction. The positive feedbacks of global warming are like two meta-stable states of the snow, top of the mountain and bottom of the mountain. Just like we went from an ice age to a modern climate, we're on our way from a modern climate to global warming. And that climate won't be stable either, eventually something else will happen, another set of positive feedback will kick in, and the earth will move to yet another equilibrium.

It would only take a degree or two of variation to trigger the runaway event, but that's never happened due to variations in sun activity?

I don't know how typical it is for the sun to cause a crazy hot year, but one really hot year doesn't do much. The permafrost doesn't melt in one hot year, it takes a lot of hot years in a row.

Every morning I read Breitbart first, then MSM (via Google News). Breitbart to find out what happened, and MSM to find out why it was Trump's fault.

I read a lot of MSM and Trump's administration has gone more or less how I expected, as has the climate over the past couple decades.

Somehow I suspect you end up being either surprised the state of reality a lot more often than I do.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[rkordmaa]

So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?

Well here is the thing, there have been runaways like that, in both directions and quite a few of them. There have been both snowball earth periods and periods with tropics at the poles. Cooling is also an runaway process, more snow means higher albedo means less heat means more snow. In fact if you look at temperatures over geological timescales then Earths climate tends to spend most of the time in one extreme or another. Current global temperatures are rather anomalous, because they are somewhere in the middle, an unstable situation that isn't helped by human activity.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[Ol Olsoc]

It sounds like the permafrost melting thing is an unstable equilibrium: the more it melts, the more carbon and methane goes into the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, and the more it melts.

So, here's my question: if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?

Because there isn't an unlimited amount of CO2. methane, and the other so-called greenhouses. There have been times in the past when the CO2 levels were much higher, and the temperatures were higher as well. enough to more than compensate for the dimmer sun of the period.

So if all of the sequestered Methane was released, it would suck up energy, and given that it is a much stronger greenhouse gas, would affect temperatures quite a bit. It does dissipate more quickly than CO2, so it would not affect temps for as long It's still up there for a long time by human timescales. There is a wild card in all this too, the methane clathrates that are at present, sitting at the bottom of the oceans. So we wouldn't have runaway greenhouse warming, but it could get really unpleasant for a while, and with a lot of political and social issues.

But eventually, we would settle into a warmer, but likely slowly declining quasi-equilibrium.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[Tenebrousedge]

But eventually, we would settle into a warmer, but likely slowly declining quasi-equilibrium.

Burning all the world's fossil fuels would make the poles pretty tropical for (IIRC) 10e4-10e5 years before silicate weathering would bring things down to a reasonably semblance of normality.

Ultimately the reason why Earth cannot undergo a true runaway warming scenario is that the stratosphere is cold. Water vapor condenses and precipitates out of the upper atmosphere instead of building up there, and CO2 can't get the job done by itself. In a half-billion years or so the increasing solar output will be enough to slowly cook off the oceans, and we'll enter into a 'moist greenhouse' phase before things get *really* toasty.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[HiThere]

Unfortunately, this isn't really certain. Venus started off not that different from Earth. And the sun has warmed over time.

The real truth is that we don't *KNOW* that we won't set off a run-away greenhouse effect which doesn't end up with the oceans boiling off into space (slowly, admittedly, but water vapor in the ionosphere tends to loose hydrogen under the influence of solar ultraviolet). We tend to *believe* that this won't happen, but our models aren't good enough to prove this outside of the range under which they have been validated. (Even where they've been validated, they tend to have large error bars, but once you get outside that area...just don't count on them.)

That's the real reason that the limit of 2 degrees was set. (Well, that and being easy to communicate.) We really don't expect a sudden change at 2 degrees, which is quite fortunate as there's no way we're going to stay within those bounds, but the models become less reliable as you get further away from where they've been tested. And we know for sure that the change won't be evenly distributed.

Re:Unstable equilibrium

[drinkypoo]

"if we are sitting on an unstable equilibrium like that, why hasn't there been runaway carbon dioxide warming in the past?"

There has been. We didn't exist yet so we didn't care. The carbon was sequestered by trees. It turned into oil and we burned it and now it isn't sequestered.

Re:In other climate news

[silentcoder]

No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE. Democrats can neither approve nor deny a nomination that hasn't been made. Democrats fought against some of Trump's nominees - and lost every battle. But the vast majority of posts he has never nominated anybody for at all. Because Don the Con has zero interest in doing the president's actual job. He occupies the job for one purpose only: to take a lot of taxpayer money for himself.
Already the secret service is bankrupt from bills they have to pay to properties owned by Trump on his constant vacations. The man they are protecting is actually billing them for the privilege of protecting him - to the extent that they are now broke.

Like Brock Long?

[Okian Warrior]

No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE.

You mean like Brock Long, head of FEMA?

The Brock Long that isn't incompetent?

The Brock Long that was confirmed in June?

Re:Like Brock Long?

[amiga3D]

Quit confusing the issue with facts.

Re:Like Brock Long?

[drinkypoo]

If Trump follows his usual pattern, he won't actually make it possible for Brock to do his job, no matter how competent he might be. I'd be glad to be proved wrong, but have no faith that it even can happen, let alone will.

Re:Like Brock Long?

[Anonymous Coward]

At first he didn't exist, and now he'll be hamstrung by Trump?

I like kool-aid too.

Re:Like Brock Long?

[0xdeadbeef]

I love how we've gotten to the point that a "gotcha" is that the president nominated someone for a post, and that the nominee isn't incompetent.

Trump managed to not fuck something up. Take that, libtards!

Re:Like Brock Long?

[hey!]

There's been a considerable effort in recent weeks to reign in some of the chaos in the White House, led by John Kelly, which I expect to be at least moderately successful in the near term. We're still operating under an Obama budget at least through September, and hopefully the Republicans learned their emergency response lesson from Katrina.

Most of all, Donald Trump wants to look good. This is true of all politicians, but it's rare to have this level of narcissism even in a politician. He also has too short an attention span to interfere much in details.

So I expect in the near term at least things will run well at FEMA.

What we will see from the President is extravagant gestures and posturing on disaster management, until inevitably something falls short. It always does, even through no fault of the agency or administration, because that's the nature of a disaster: it undermines your ability to cope.

Then at *that* point he'll turn on Long, just like he's turned on everyone else who has served him faithfully when matters touching his image can't be avoided.

Re:Like Brock Long?

[tbannist]

What? Are you unable to read usernames? They're right there under the subject line. One says PopeRatzo and the other says drinkypoo, that's usually a hint that they aren't the same person and might have independent thoughts.

Re: Blame Trump

[Jesus H Rolle]

Also also, the senate pulled a parliamentary trick to block Trump recess appointments.

Recess appointments are a sleazy tactic designed to bypass the constitutional requirement that the Senate confirm the nominee.

Gentle response

[Okian Warrior]

I wish you'd call it a lie when Trump says it and acknowledge that people can be wrong without lying.

Whether Mr. Long is competent, or not, will be seen shortly, but I won't accuse you of lying if he isn't.

I'm sorry that my response offended you.

Next time I'll remember to be polite and gentle responding to a leftist post, because those posts always are.

Re:In other climate news

[meglon]

...and because you can't seem to be able to read....

Here is what is happening: Democrats are requiring that Republicans check all the procedural boxes on most nominees....

...which means, the rules say it has to be done a specific way, and democrats are saying the republicans have to follow the rules.

“The level of obstruction exhibited by Senate Democrats on these nominees is just breathtaking,” Mr. McConnell said...

...and yet it is still far, far better than what McConnell and the other bitch republicans did with Merrick Garland, a level of obstruction that had never been seen before. And because you're an inbred little piece of shit hypocrite...

Republicans engaged in similar procedural combat after Democrats made the 2013 change, tying up the Senate to slow President Barack Obama’s push to fill judicial vacancies.

So, you vindictive partisan fuck..... go to a library and beg them to get you into a class to teach you how to read. Then cut your nuts off, you ignorant dipshits are fucking up the gene pool.

Re:Blame Trump

[meglon]

Also, Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process

Conservatives sure do like being hypocritical little twats.

Republicans engaged in similar procedural combat after Democrats made the 2013 change, tying up the Senate to slow President Barack Obama’s push to fill judicial vacancies.

Here's some light reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with highlights:

The Washington Post has identified 587 key positions requiring U.S. Senate confirmation. Of those key positions, As of August 17, 2017, 117 of Trump's nominees have been confirmed, 106 are awaiting confirmation, and 0 have been announced but not yet formally nominated.

So.... of the 587 key positions, Trump has nominated 223 as of a week ago. Then, there's this other side of things:

http://www.politico.com/story/...

At least 17 of Trump’s nominees took more than a month to be officially sent to the Senate, at which point the vetting by senators and aides can begin in earnest, according to a POLITICO analysis. (One of the 17 nominations, Jim Donovan to be Trump’s deputy Treasury secretary, has since been withdrawn).

I get it... i really do understand; you conservatives are fucking hypocrites who have to play the victim all the time because you can't govern worth a shit. When you do get in power, the only fucking thing you do is to try to stay in power, instead of help the country.... oh... and whine, a lot.

Back then

[meglon]

Back when it was being built, our next door neighbor (a carpenter) went up to work on it. I remember at the time there was a lot of concern about how it was being built, directly onto the permafrost... you know, that frozen ground that had been frozen solid for tens of thousands of years. It's going to be one costly s.o.b. when the oil companies who have privatized most of the profit for decades leave the mess for the taxpayers to have to clean up.

Re:Blame Trump

[Mal-2]

Democrats are slowing down the confirmation process so that at the current rate, congress will get through all of Trump's nominations in 11 years (!).

That's the blowback from refusing to even hold hearings on a replacement for Scalia until "the right person" could make that appointment. Now that they've armed this loose cannon, they're going to be repeatedly shot with it -- and it serves them right. Always assume that your opponents will eventually get possession of the ball, and craft your rule changes accordingly. They didn't, this is what happens.

Re: Blame Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitler gassed millions of people, therefore I can gas millions of people.

(You logic)

Re:Aren't land mammals rare though?

[sexconker]

"In the animal kingdom, all animals are nomads. None of them farm."

"Ants farm, and so do beavers."

Second AC wins.

Re:In other climate news

[Kevin108]

Punctuating your opinion with ad hominem attacks will certainly get others to understand your point.

Re:In other climate news

[religionofpeas]

I'm sure the good people of Texas don't want federal help. They are perfectly capable of helping themselves.

Re:In other climate news

[serviscope_minor]

Good try, but Trump hasn't even nominated anyone for the posts I listed.

Look: you still don't get it. Trump hasn't nominated them and for the nominated ones the republicans control both houses, but it's still the democrat's fault.

Re:In other climate news

[amiga3D]

Thus Trump adds even more to global warming as CNN goes into a NOVA like meltdown. The permafrost is fucked.

Re: Who cares

[amiga3D]

I'm doing my part to get rid of the damn cows. I've got 6 thick juicy ribeye steaks in my fridge now and set to go on the grill tomorrow. Join me and let's eat all those cows.

Re:Blame Trump

[drinkypoo]

Short memory Kiddo, The republicans learned this stunt from us 16 years ago.

I like how you talk shit but provide no citation. Classy! Thanks for helping make Slashdot grate! Lazy fuckhead.

Re:In other climate news

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even know what a "transgendered people" is. Is that like a transsexual?

Sort-of-ish. But there isn't need to go into the distinction in detail because, from reading the statement in question, they are using the term specifically for people who have undergone gender reassignment surgery and are dependent on chronic medication. It seems that they consider being transgender as something similar to having severe asthma.

use some logic here

[doctorvo]

Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter -- plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose.

So, this carbon was captured only "centuries ago", yet its release back into the atmosphere is going to lead to unprecedented global warming that is going to destroy civilization, wipe out humanity, and maybe end higher life on the planet?

Somebody needs to get their stories straight.

Re:use some logic here

[drinkypoo]

So, this carbon was captured only "centuries ago",

Things captured millenia ago were also captured centuries ago, only more of them. But most importantly, more people know what a century is than a millenium.

Re:use some logic here

[doctorvo]

Things captured millenia ago were also captured centuries ago, only more of them.

The article says "took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago" which I summarized as "captured centuries ago". Sorry, that's unambiguous and cannot refer to your interpretation.

But most importantly, more people know what a century is than a millenium.

Are you having a stroke? In any case, if you're trying to say that the term "centuries" can also refer to a small number of millennia, you are correct. Given climate history, however, that makes the statement of the article even more incongruous.

Re:In other climate news

[doctorvo]

A category 4 hurricane just hit the Texas coast and our President still hasn't appointed anyone to head the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, or any of the agencies that deal with hurricanes.

As usual, you are either uninformed or simply lying:

Long was confirmed as FEMA administrator by the Senate in June, just a few months ago, but he is not exactly a stranger to the agency. He was a regional manager there during the George W. Bush administration, and he went on to serve as Alabama's emergency management director.

As for DHS, Trump got both Kelly and Duke confirmed; Kelly has taken on a new role and Duke is acting director until a new nomination. You know, as it should be.

Re: How did the plants sink into the permafrost?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Milankovitch cycle (which is the relevant one here) means it should currently be cooling, which is what was happening for 8000 years until now. What process do you suggest that is stronger than this cycle, given you've just said this cycle is dominant?

In terms of human influence, please explain why the physics of radiation balance historically applies to CO2 from non-fossil sources, but not to that from fossil sources released by man?

Re: Aren't land mammals rare though?

[Entrope]

Over the last (roughly) 200,000 years, we have gone from 1% of the genus Homo to 100% of the genus Homo. Discuss, with particular emphasis on why we should think either measure is important.

Re:Blame Trump

[El Cubano]

Short memory Kiddo, The republicans learned this stunt from us 16 years ago.

I like how you talk shit but provide no citation. Classy! Thanks for helping make Slashdot grate! Lazy fuckhead.

Here you go: courtesy of then-Senator Joe Biden

It was rather aggressively reported by quite a number of media outlets, though I suppose the particular media outlets from which you consume news helpfully decided that this particular bit of information was not at all newsworthy.

Re:In other climate news

[El Cubano]

"The level of obstruction exhibited by Senate Democrats on these nominees is just breathtaking," Mr. McConnell said...

...and yet it is still far, far better than what McConnell and the other bitch republicans did with Merrick Garland, a level of obstruction that had never been seen since at least 1992 thanks to then-Senator Joe Biden and the Democrats. And because you're an inbred little piece of shit hypocrite...

There. I fixed that for you. Here is a citation in case you are unaware of what I am referring to.

Re:In other climate news

[serviscope_minor]

Really? Which one?

Hillary of course.

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

I'm sure the good people of Texas don't want federal help. They are perfectly capable of helping themselves.

I happen to be in Texas, and the people down here can't even help themselves to a decent education.

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

Duke is acting director until a new nomination.

Elaine Duke is a placeholder. Who has Donald Trump nominated to be the head of DHS? Oh, that's rignt...nobody.

Re: Aren't land mammals rare though?

[Ol Olsoc]

Over the last (roughly) 200,000 years, we have gone from 1% of the genus Homo to 100% of the genus Homo.

This is why republicans hate those homos.

If permafrost is lost...

[ELCouz]

wouldn't be offset with trees/plants finally growing in this region like it was before?

Re:If permafrost is lost...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly no. The reason is simple enough to understand. The carbon locked in rocks that we use for fossil fuels represent the accumulation from plant materials sequestered over tens and hundreds of millions of years. Consequently, the reservoir of this material in terms of total carbon is far greater than the total amount of plant material ever alive at any one time. The current problem is that we are releasing all of this sequestered carbon essentially all at once on a geological time scale. That is why the Earth is now heating at a rate about 30 times faster than during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the largest previous spike in temperature in Earth History.

Re:In other climate news

[PPH]

An education isn't that difficult to come by if everything you need to know is contained in one book.

Or you could attack the heat directly.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.

Or you could attack the alleged problem - heat - directly.

Orbital sunshades can give you as much cooling as you want. But that's pretty high tech (though far cheaper than the economic damage of most of the current prescriptions.) But there are cheaper and easier ways.

For instance: You could change the albedo so the Earth, or large parts of it, turned black in the infrared window. This can be done with a number of materials, some of them very cheap (like 0.8 micron glass microspheres - about a tenth the diameter of red blood cells).

Such microspheres, embedded in a plastic film with the bottom side silvered for reflectivity, produce 93 watts per square meter of net COOLING in the direct noonday sun - and they work 24/7. That's good for 10 degrees C (18 F) - which is more than four times the temperature rise that the global warming proponents are saying is catastrophic. The material can be made for $0.50/square meter even with current processes.

Without the mirror coating and plastic film, just scattered over the existing surfaces, I'd expect them to do at least half as well (as long as they were on top), and be a hell of a lot cheaper. So if they aren't more of an inhalation hazard than desert sand, scattering them over things like the Sahara could both drastically drop its temperature and substantially reduce that of the planet, as well.

But you'd better be REALLY SURE the planet is actually warming up - rather than, say, falling into the next ice age in a few hundred years. Sweeping up those glass beads (or undoing a number of other "warming mitigations") might be more difficult than deploying them.

Re:Or you could attack the heat directly.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Ummm, sure. If you cover the _entire_ planet with them. That would only cost about $255 trillion going by your numbers.

Like I said: MUCH cheaper than the current government-based proposals. B-)

That's for the much more expensive plastic film, with the beads embedded and a vacuum sputtered silver coating on the down side.

Also: You don't have to cover the ENTIRE planet. Just a fifth of the sunny side of the land masses should do the trick. B-)

Grains of sand are nearly 2 million times larger than the microbeads you propose (assuming typical sand grains of about a millimeter)j

Knock an order of magnitude or two off that, then take into account that it's a fractal distribution. (I'd be more concerned that the smaller particles tend to go down and the larger up as the sand is disturbed.)

I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.

Re:Or you could attack the heat directly.

[bhiestand]

I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.

It's also worth noting that those "solutions":

• - don't help with ocean acidification or any other negative effects of elevated CO2 levels
• - don't create cleaner new power sources
• - impose substantial new risks (too much cooling, etc.)
• - are equally difficult or impossible to undo

Sure, there are lots of insane and ridiculously expensive things we can do to bring down global average temperatures... but how in the hell can that be a better idea than building cleaner new power sources, increasing energy efficiency, and improving our transportation story?

A better first step?

[Joviex]

A better first step would be to turn off the machines that actively add carbon to the air.

So, you are gonna close your mouth hole? You are a carbon exhaust machine, maroon.

Re:A better first step?

[Anonymous Coward]

right after you stop writing stupid shit on your computer

Re:A better first step?

[religionofpeas]

So, you are gonna close your mouth hole?

The carbon from my mouth was sequestered by plants less than a few years ago. It's a carbon-neutral cycle. I bet you knew that already.

Re: A better first step?

[KGIII]

Not really, no. The plants didn't magic their way into your mouth.

How many trees?

[XXongo]

Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.

You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.

OK, let's calculate. Here's a source talking about CO2 absorption by trees: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... , and here's a source saying "A tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.": https://projects.ncsu.edu/proj...

This one says that trees absorb 40% of the 28 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted per year: World's forests absorb almost 40 per cent of man made CO2

If we take just that last figure, it's easy: we need to increase the number of trees to 250% of the existing number: plant an additional 150% as many trees as already exist on Earth.

Google tells me that 30% of the Earth's land area is covered by trees ( ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0... ), so the quick estimate is that we need to plant enough trees to change this to 75%.

Re: How many trees?

[guruevi]

Do you have any idea how much land that encompasses. Besides the fact that humans take up ~50% of the land mass and 1/3 of the water sources for primarily agriculture, you got a deficit of 25% land mass even if you cover every portions of land (e.g. Sahara) with trees.

Re: How many trees?

[XXongo]

Do you have any idea how much land that encompasses.

Well, yes: the calculation pretty clearly shows that this is impractical.

I happen to be the kind of person who likes to do the calculation and then say it's impractical, rather than just shouting out an opinion without numbers.

I like numbers.

Re:In other climate news

[doctorvo]

Who has Donald Trump nominated to be the head of DHS? Oh, that's rignt...nobody.

As I was saying: As for DHS, Trump got both Kelly and Duke confirmed

Elaine Duke is a placeholder.

Elaine Duke is the confirmed undersecretary, not a "placeholder".

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

Elaine Duke is only the acting head of DHS. They are awaiting Trump to nominate someone.

Re:Good.

[hey!]

You realize it will still get cold in the winter, don't you?

AGW's direct effects in high latitudes are confined to the summer, when there is solar radiation to trap.

Granted there are indirect effects caused by the trapping of thermal energy in the oceans and the exchange of air masses with lower latitudes, but on most winter days it will as cold as it ever was.

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

Then fuck off back to Chicago, prick.

In a few days, we're moving to the Central Coast of California. Texas is a shithole (especially Houston, but the whole state is garbage). The people are great, but the actual state is as ugly as it gets and the climate is a steaming turd I can't get out of here fast enough. We're gonna be living near the ocean and I'm going to learn to surf and be insulated in the People's Republic of California, about as far away from Washington DC and Donald Trump as one can get in the lower 48. There's wine in wine country and vegetables in the valley and I'm hoping my new home state goes ahead and secedes from the rest of you jackoffs.

It's well worth the additional living expense to be somewhere beautiful, where the climate is actually fit for humans and there are no Hurricane Harveys (It was fucked up here last night).

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

Elaine Duke is the confirmed undersecretary, not a "placeholder".

I don't know if you've ever worked in a place that had an "acting" director or manager, but if you did, you'd know that means "placeholder". Elaine Duke is a placeholder.

And what kind of a name is "Duke", anyway? Is she related to the famous Trump supporter and head of the KKK David Duke by any chance?

Re:In other climate news

[doctorvo]

I don't know if you've ever worked in a place that had an "acting" director or manager, but if you did, you'd know that means "placeholder". Elaine Duke is a placeholder.

I think we have firmly established that you have been lying, lying, and lying again.

And what kind of a name is "Duke", anyway? Is she related to the famous Trump supporter and head of the KKK David Duke by any chance?

You tell me: you're the fascist.

Re:Blame Trump

[SlaveToTheGrind]

That's the blowback from refusing to even hold hearings on a replacement for Scalia until "the right person" could make that appointment.

Well, no. Your very own article points out the fundamental difference: "Democrats are requiring that Republicans check all the procedural boxes on most nominees, even those they intend to eventually support ."

So they're not doing it because they think the appointees shouldn't be confirmed, and they have no expectation that their behavior is going to change the outcome. They're doing it purely to delay.

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

it was downgraded to a Cat 1 once it hit shore.

That's simply not true. It hit Rockport, Corpus and Matagorda as a Cat 4 last night at about 10pm. It wasn't downgraded to Cat 3 until this morning. It is expected to go down to Cat 1 status later today. Winds are still over 90mph down here.

Re:Aren't land mammals rare though?

[SuperKendall]

Ants don't count as land mammals.

So what you are saying then s you do not believe in evolution being possible - classic science denial!!!

Political Science

[Tenebrousedge]

AGW was first proposed in 1896, and discredited for the next five decades. During the period 1950-1970 the growing body of evidence was sufficient to reverse the consensus, and since then all of the evidence is pointing towards, "Yes, this phenomenon is real and behaves as we expect." Denying this has become a symbol of ideological purity for a current political party, but there's only so far one can take that tactic.

The science is really pretty simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Originally, we did not think that it could build up in the atmosphere, and we thought that it could not contribute any more to warming than [a] what it was already doing, and [b] what water vapor was doing. After we became better able to observe the upper atmosphere, it was realized that, yes, there was a bit of a gap for CO2 in the H2O spectrum, but more importantly, the CO2-dense part of the atmosphere extends quite a bit higher than the tropopause. But what does that matter if it's already completely opaque at lower CO2 concentrations?

The effect of a higher partial pressure of CO2 is to push the CO2-dense region of the atmosphere further out into space, increasing the effective 'top-of-atmosphere'. This means that outgoing radiation must take a longer path out of the atmosphere, which effectively traps heat in the lower atmosphere. The "no-feedback forcing" can be relatively straightforwardly calculated to be ~3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which is equivalent to about 1 degree C of global temperature change.

Now, that in itself is not a huge deal. The issue is that H2O is a strong greenhouse gas and you may have noticed that there happens to be some rather large reservoirs of that stuff lying around just itching to be part of the atmosphere. We've spent quite a bit of time looking for ways that the H2O feedback won't end up being a huge issue. And I think that I'm maligning anyone to suggest that Dr. Lindzen has had the most credible alternate hypothesis in decades, which sadly he has not been able to find credible evidence for. Some major flaw in the physics of H2O is about all that would save us at this point.

AGW is a theory that we've been trying to disprove for more than a century. We've known for about 150 years that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that many human activities release large amounts of this substance, but the initial assumption was that climate was cyclical and that warm years would balance out cold ones. The theories of AGW and climate change have at every step had to fight for acceptance among people who (reasonably enough) were not prepared to believe in them.

And then in more recent history there is a crowd of conservative voices who have -- being generous -- rejected empiricism in favor of a more rationalist epistemology. Truth is not what you measure -- measurements can be biased, measurers can lie -- truth is what you can prove with logic and reason. It's not like science can measure God, and those scientists are all leftist eggheads anyway. Those elitists don't have a monopoly on truth. Which is all well and good, and certainly an internally consistent philosophy, but if the tragedy of empiricism is never being sure of anything, the problem with non-empirical philosophies is that they are under no obligation to be consistent with observable reality. Politicians at the moment find it useful to take up an anti-empirical position, and rather sensibly they've picked a topic which to date has yet to make much meaningful impact on the lives of most Americans. (I'm from Alaska; the glaciers and permafrost melting has been fairly readily apparent there, since the bulk of these effects has been at the lower alpine/tidewater icefields and the edges of the permafrost fields -- the most visible and accessible areas.)

At this point the Republicans seem a bit screwed. Their constituency won't allow them to walk this one back -- supporting climate science has been a great way to lose Republican primaries in recent years. Symptoms of warming are (consistent with other conspiracy the

Re:Political Science

[Tenebrousedge]

I'm not sure why you think this contradicts anything I've said. Are you under the impression that the molecule retains that heat energy for longer than a few milliseconds?

Re:Political Science

[MooseMiester]

The greatest contributor to CO2 is carbon monoxide. Here's how we are doing on that front according to the EPA:

https://www.epa.gov/air-trends...

Between 1980 and 2016 we've had an 85% decrease. 85%! These numbers are from the EPA.

Here's a nice collection of quotes from experts:

http://www.c3headlines.com/glo...

This is why some people are skeptical.

Re:Political Science

[Tenebrousedge]

The greatest contributor to CO2 is carbon monoxide.

For the sake of charity I'm forced to assume that this is not what you meant to say. Carbon monoxide has a negligible influence on climate. It absorbs little energy directly and only persists in the atmosphere for about a month. See the summary here, or the full paper here.[pdf]

This is why some people are skeptical.

I hope that by "some people" you are excluding yourself from the group of people who would take a page of celebrity quotations as a credible argument of any sort. "Some people" are "skeptical" because they have no use for objective reality. Mostly they have no idea what they're even saying, and they refuse to expose themselves to enough information about the subject to make a remotely sensible objection. Saying, "AGW isn't happening," is a non-statement. Humans are dumping huge amounts of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, which will result in warming. If you're disputing that fact, what part are you disputing? That humans are releasing gigatons of carbon, or that it's a greenhouse gas? Keeping in mind that the heat properties of CO2 can be verified in your basement. What part of thermodynamics is wrong? What term is missing from our radiative transfer equations? What hidden mechanism would transfer excess heat from the Earth? It's like saying that gravity is wrong -- it's not a claim in itself, and it's not to say that you're automatically a crackpot, but you do need to account for a couple contrary observations in your theory, and your explanation should probably be better than "I dunno, but it's still wrong!"

Personally, I maintain some hope that AGW will turn out to be milder than anticipated. The 3.7 W/m^2 is a pretty hard lower bound due to thermodynamics, but the H2O feedbacks allow for a fairly wide range of scenarios. It would be nice if Dr. Lindzen's Iris hypothesis were credible. As things are, however, there's just not a lot of room for alternate theories. Any unknown effects would have to be extremely large to offset the warming signal, and extremely subtle to not have been noticed to date in any of the atmospheres that we have studied. Given that our atmospheric physics equations describe extraterrestrial atmospheres well, including the atmosphere of the Sun, the amount of special pleading that would be required seems effectively infinite.

Re:Political Science

[MooseMiester]

The point of the CO graph is to show the incredible progress that's been made since the Environmental Movement started - a fact that's almost always omitted from any news story. The majority of quotes in the other article are from Environmental Scientists and the like, not celebrities.

IMHO the Climate Change Industry has done far, far more damage to the Earth's Climate than any polluter. Had they not wildly exaggerated their claims, had they not enlisted the elites to their climate conferences in private jets and limos, had they not turned the whole thing into a money making project for many of the participants, had they not made dire predictions of doom year after year, had they not turned environmentalism into some kind of religion where any discussion is treated as heresy, had they not fudged the fucking data to keep the grant money coming.... Had all that money been spent on true Environmental Cleanup and technology... We as a species would be one hell of a lot better off. This article is yet another chapter in the Climate Change Industry shooting itself in the foot, and it makes me very sad.

But I can tell from your response I am wasting my breath. Because I don't parrot the Climate Change talking points I am obviously the enemy and therefore need to be labeled as ignorant, racist, or worse. Which is also a huge part of the problem, and it does insurmountable damage to Climate Science as well.

Re:Political Science

[Tenebrousedge]

It's like you saw those characterizations as a challenge to live out. I admit, it's amusing.

Because I don't parrot the Climate Change talking points I am obviously the enemy and therefore need to be labeled as ignorant, racist, or worse.

The first symptom of emotional reasoning is projection, it seems. I would never think of you as an enemy; that would imply that I took you seriously. Your introduction of the topic of racism is suggestive, but not interesting. If you want to take on some labels voluntarily then that would seem like a personal issue.

The point of the CO graph is to show the incredible progress that's been made since the Environmental Movement started

I'm not sure how you can confuse this for "incredible progress", and I don't think that you quite understand the distinction between environmental activists and climate scientists. It's not some sense of stewardship that is driving the IPCC, it's the straightforward application of the known physics of the carbon dioxide molecule. Carbon monoxide is only a serious environmental concern by the stretch of a desperate imagination.

There seems to be a popular delusion among conservatives that climate science begins and ends with An Inconvenient Truth, probably because no stretch of the imagination will encompass a political conspiracy of scientists lasting for more than ten decades. In this way you can dismiss uncontroversial facts as "talking points". It's not that you're not parroting talking points, however: you haven't even identified what points you might or might not be repeating. I'm not convinced you have any idea what you even believe about the physics. As long as these scientists are wrong you don't have to think about that, right?

Re:Political Science

[MooseMiester]

Being arrogant and condescending - and then insinuating I'm deluded - is the mark of youth. You'll grow out of it. You impressed me by not calling me a racist or a Nazi.

I suggest you re-read the quotes and try to engage in critical thinking, rather than denigrating everyone who disagrees with you. Start with "We're running out of time"

Re:How did the plants sink into the permafrost?

[HiThere]

IIUC, Antarctica *HAS* been relatively stable in it's position for an extremely long time. Back through the Jurassic. I also doubt that the North American plate has crossed the equator twice...unless you mean a projection from it crossed the equator and then retreated. The major continental drift has been away from what is now the central Atlantic ocean, though there was certainly a lot of rotational movement as well, and India moved quite rapidly away from Africa and is now ploughing into Asia.

It *is* true that Africa and Australia were once (LONG ago) connected via Antarctica, and that Antarctica was relatively warm at that time. (Temperate forest.) But the days in that forest were about 6 months long, so it was in the same position. I presume that it was warmed by ocean currents the same way Iceland, Ireland, and the west coast of North America are.

But the continental drift happens on a different time scale that the growth of vegetation in the permafrost area. What probably happened (this is a guess) was that the position of Greenland shifted from an earlier position in which the Gulf Stream was directed all the way up into the Arctic Ocean, causing the pole to be a lot warmer. Slowly Greenland drifted to it's current position where the channel up past Hudson's Bay is too narrow to allow significant flow (and then it iced up which really stopped things). This caused the Arctic Ocean to freeze. The problem with this is there are some indications that at least in some areas the freeze happened quite rapidly, so some details are clearly missing or wrong.

  ---- separator ---- line ---- encountered ---- lameness ---- filter ----
The following part is a guess. Don't believe it, but take it seriously.

But note that in the current permafrost area the vegetation that ended up under the permafrost was annuals rather than perennials (like trees), so imagine that for a long time it was an area that was swampy during the summer and frozen during the winter, and chilly all the way to the bottom of the bog. In fact a good model would probably be the colder Irish peat bogs. Then it really froze, and the decomposition slowed to a crawl. But this allowed more oxygen to diffuse into the mess, because now life processes were too slow to use it up. So when it melts not ALL the decomposition will be anaerobic. This will be important because aerobic processes are more energetically efficient, but it will be limited, because not that much oxygen is around. This means a rapid bloom followed be a slow continuation.

Re:In other climate news

[PopeRatzo]

I didn't know Soros paid for moving expenses.

He does once you make regional manager. Currently, I'm a assistant vice president for all left-wing trolls, counter-protesters and transgender activists West of the Mississippi, so I was able to get moving expenses. Plus, when I get to California, I'm given a medical marijuana card immediately and am eligible for free gender-reassignment surgery for my dog.

I wouldn't have thought being a paid Democrat shill paid enough to afford the ridiculous taxes imposed on Californians

It actually pays very well, but it's a strict meritocracy. My evaluations are based on the number of Slashdot Anonymous Cowards I can make jump up and down and piss themselves in fury. And let me tell you, business is a-boomin'.

But at least solar panels won't warm the globe...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

By the way: One of my concerns about the increased use of solar panels for power is that they absorb far more sunlight than the surfaces they shade - like nearly all of it, when much might have been reflected back to space. All of it goes to heat - about a fifth when the power is used (if the panels are very efficient), the rest right there at the panel as various losses.

But it turns out that this stuff re-radiates to space roughly as much energy as the panel absorbs. It also cools the panel, which makes it more efficient. And it's cheap enough that coating the panel adds more power-in-the-wires per buck than building the uncoated panel, so it will be a price-performance improvement that is likely to actually be deployed. Much better.

Re:Blame Trump

[Mal-2]

First, I didn't link any article (I responded to someone who did), and second, I don't think it is at all unreasonable to demand a full work-up on every nominee when it has been amply demonstrated that Trump sometimes (often?) makes picks based on loyalty and nepotism rather than qualifications. This should surprise nobody, it's how he got where he is.

Re:In other climate news

[tbannist]

Punctuating your opinion with ad hominem attacks will certainly get others to understand your point.

Those aren't "ad hominem attacks", they're insults and they're not the same thing. For example an ad hominem goes like this "Nothing you say is correct because you're an illiterate moron", however, "You're an illiterate moron because nothing you say is correct" is not an ad hominem, it's just insulting. The crucial part of an "ad hominem" is dismissing the argument because of who the person making the argument is. Insulting someone while you are making an argument is rude but not fallacious.

For the record, I tend to agree with your point that punctuating your arguments with insults rarely does anything to convince people who are inclined to disagree with you.

Re:How did the plants sink into the permafrost?

[Alypius]

Really? This is modded down?

Re:In other climate news

[david_thornley]

Already the secret service is bankrupt from bills they have to pay to properties owned by Trump

From the Constitution, Article 2, Section One: "The President shall, as stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them."

I want clawback lawsuits after he leaves office.