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Mathematical Formula Predicts Global Mass Extinction Event in 2100 (vice.com)
Kate Lunau, writing for Motherboard: A new paper in Science Advances finds that a mass extinction period mirroring ones from our planet's ancient past could be triggered when humanity adds a certain amount of carbon to the oceans, which are home to the majority of all plants and animals on our planet. The paper pegs that amount at 310 gigatons. According to lead author Daniel Rothman of MIT, based on projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we're on course to hit that number by 2100. After that, we enter "unknown territory." [...] Previous mass extinctions have happened over the course of thousands or millions of years, but the period of change we're in right now has lasted centuries at best, making it hard to compare them. Although plenty of experts say Earth is already experiencing a sixth mass extinction, that remains "a scientific question," Rothman, who is professor of geophysics in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, told me. Once our planet hits the threshold he identified in this paper, he explained, it will kickstart changes that will "amplify" everything that came before. These same changes, to reiterate, have been associated with all previous mass extinctions on Earth.
The possibility of a catastrophic feedback is indeed the wild card in global warming calculations: there is a lot of carbon dioxide and methane trapped in frozen soil and in undersea clathrates, and it is indeed possible that there is a threshold above which these will be released, dramatically increasing the temperature. It has happened in the past.
When people talk about the uncertainty in global warming predictions, this is one uncertainty that is often left out: the possiblility that the models are accurate about short-term warming but significantly underestimate long-term warming.
But this is also extremely hard to model.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In the past the usual suspects who claimed we were all doomed DOOMED I SAY were stupid enough to make predictions with 5 or 10 year time horizons.
Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty of people who will try to shove any doomsday prediction that doesn't come true down the memory hole via the usual dodges of "They never *really* said that!" or "OMG they were totally right because [insert vague allusion to a statistic here]!" even though it turns out everybody is strangely still not dead.
My personal favorites are the climate models that are completely wrong that are used as the basis for doomsday scenarios. When the scenarios don't come true, anybody with the temerity to point out that the Human Race hasn't gone extinct is attacked for being anti-science because some *completely different climate model* didn't predict doomsday. Therefore: 1. The models were *always* right (because they predicted every possible outcome and one of the outcomes happened). And 2. If you disagree with our *new* Doomsday prediction then you must be anti-science because guess what... the models are *always* right (see above where the "correct" model that didn't predict Doomsday turned out to be correct).
However, even with the usual propaganda machine in full swing it's hard to literally predict a mass extinction in 2015 and then accuse everyone who points our your inaccuracy in 2017 of being an anti-science big oil shill. So instead they've just pushed the Doomsday date far enough out into the future that they won't have to worry about it. Well played, well played.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Look, China, India, the UK, the EU, Canada, Japan, and the Northeastern and Western US are all AHEAD of where we needed to be on renewables to avoid this. We met and exceeded the 2025 renewables goals in 2016.
...
Starting in 2018 more than 80 percent of all cars and trucks sold worldwide will be electric only or plug-in electric hybrids with a biodiesel option.
This sounds completely made up. Any links to support it?
Water is everywhere, our bodies are mostly water by weight, and yet you somehow want me to believe that if I'm submerged in water for just a few minutes I'll die? That makes no sense to anyone with a shred of scientific understanding of our bodies, or indeed basic biology.
I read the internet for the articles.
Here's the reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The key there is the number of mass-extinction events in our fossil records are directly connected with exactly these same events.
When methane vents open up under the ocean from various gethermal processes, they make this kind of gel (methane clathrate) that builds up at the ocean floor and sediment. There's a LOT of this stuff.
Anyway, when this gel reaches a certain temperature, the methane that was 'frozen' in it gets released relatively quickly. Methane already is like carbon pollution on steroids, and the scale of this release is literally world-changing, compared to say cow gas releases.
Again - this has happened several times already, taking out the large swaths of species of the planet each time. To the point that the ground leftover looks completely different across the entire planet.
It's kind of a big deal.
Ryan Fenton
I cannot believe how freaked out everyone is about carbon, when it is a basic and abundant element of the planet...
Nobody is worried about carbon, after all we are carbon-based lifeforms. However, people are worried about carbon dioxide.
the amount in the atmosphere is minuscule to begin with, never mind whatever we are adding in being a tiny fraction of what it is already.
Doubling the amount of naturally occurring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not minuscule. Also, have you seen how thick the Earth's atmosphere is? It's a tiny bubble around the planet surface.
It is so sad to see rational people get lost in a death cult that makes absolutely no sense to anyone with a shred of scientific understanding of the climate, or indeed basic material science...
Feel free to point out exactly where the calculations have gone wrong. You'll be the world's savior and petrol companies would pay you billions for that proof.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So, no links to support it.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
hmm, if only there were these plants that could grow and used carbon dioxide as fuel......
...and if only we weren't cutting them down at a rate of about 13 million hectares a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I don't know what is worse, your comment full of dumb or the fact you got modded up for it.
The OP is making an Appeal to Stupidity. AGW is complicated, and he doesn't understand it, so therefore it can be flippantly dismissed as a non-problem.
The argument is surprisingly effective, and is also impervious to logic, facts, and evidence, since the validity of those has been dismissed a priori. It is especially effective among people that have a vested interest in accepting it.
Manufacturing is extremely energy intensive, it's where most of the end cost often resides. Renewables will not even put a dent in the armor of that massive energy demand, and price is obscene. The solution is next generation nuclear, it's the only clean source of power that can meet demand and do it safely. China is already working on it but regulatory bodies in the US are obstructing progress and refusing to do their job.
Except the models have NOT been "proven wrong by observation." I've been graphing prediction versus actual, and the model predictions are still very close to spot on.
You linked the Independent article from yesterday morning, but I notice you didn't link the one from yesterday afternoon: http://www.independent.co.uk/i...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If you truly believe global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions is occurring, and you truly believe it's going to cause mass extinction in less than 100 years, then you want to prevent it in the most effective and expeditious method we have available - nuclear power.
If you think this is just an opportunity to advance renewable energy development, then you do not truly believe one of those things. Either you think global warming is not really happening, but you can use it to scare the world into adopting your preferred energy source. Or you believe it's happening but it's not really that serious, so we have plenty of time to develop renewable energy sources and phase them in.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be our final energy source. All we need is to use it to immediately arrest climate change, buying us more time to develop cleaner energy sources. Then we can phase out nuclear power in favor of renewables. Trying to jump straight to renewables is like being on a sinking ship, and insisting that nobody is allowed to use the existing life rafts. Instead you want us to research, design, and construct new life rafts to save ourselves, even if that might take more time than it takes for the ship to sink.
There's a possibility it might work. But why take that risk? Why gamble with all life on Earth? Implement the solution which is guaranteed to work (get on the existing life rafts / switch to nuclear power). Then once the immediate threat is over we can work on developing the ideal solution (develop new life rafts / develop renewables). If there's mass extinctions starting in 2100, it's going to be the fault of the environmental movement - who prevented us from immediately turning off fossil fuels and switching to nuclear, and insisted that we instead had to roll the dice and develop new unproven energy sources which still have problems with scalability and consistency.
Good thing plants are what food eats!
Actually why don't you ask an actual botanist? Because I can tell you haven't.
Anyone with basic scientific literacy understand that plants live in ecosystems where they compete with other plants; furthermore any gardener will tell you that many plants are much more nitrogen and/or phosphorous limited than carbon limited. This means that the diversity of plant species will drop under higher CO2 scenarios as CO2 sensitive species outcompete less CO2 sensitive ones. High CO2 will be especially beneficial to plants like poison ivy that grow quickly and need lots of carbon for their cellulose structure.
Plant extinctions are easily deducible from a basic knowledge of ecology and gardening. Experimental work on CO2 impact is not promising either, indicating that many food species will produce more cellulose and other carbohydrate and less protein per pound. Plants experimentally grown in high CO2 environments develop abnormalities in their insect defenses that open them up to predation.
Understand by an "mass extinction event", we don't mean the extinction of all life. We mean a catastrophic loss of biodiversity. In a few million years, the Earth will be right as rain.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts
in the text of many articles. latest BBC rediff from Nature Geoscience quotes it. latest CBC rediff on podcasts today and last night CBUT Vancouver shows it.
do your own work.
I'd like what you say to be true, and I spent the last five minutes searching but was unable to find a single article making that claim.
Perhaps my Google-fu sucks (which it normally doesn't). In any case, you're going to have to either provide some citations or be dismissed as full of shit, because what you're claiming is a truly massive shift in transportation production and it's just not believable that it's going to happen next year.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
the "Nuclear Winter" debacle
What Nuclear Winter debacle? That a nuclear war would cause a Nuclear Winter? Don't think there's much appetite to test that theory.
the "Limits to World Growth" debacle
Do you think you can continue to consume non-renewable resources indefinitely?
the "Hockey Stick" debacle
Yet since that was published it's kept on getting warmer...
Each had one thing in common: the claim that the only way to avoid catastrophe was to adopt Marxism
[citation needed]
In fact, the Russians invented the kind of hysteria being promoted today. It's called Lysenkoism: the use of faked science to push political agendas.
No, this is quite different. With Lysenkoism it was a small group of people going against massive scientific consensus for their own gain. With climate change there is a massive scientific consensus by individual scientists who have nothing to gain personally from it.
I'll tell you what is like Lysenkoism though, a small number of politicians with links to fossil fuel pushing back against scientific consensus who are set to personally gain massively from being able to continue to sell coal and oil until the stocks start to run low.
And my point is, so what? That's a single graph, multiple recent data sources show rising temperatures, and multiple other proxy studies show historically temperatures were lower.
Even if that single study were completely debunked, there's plenty of other sources that show the same trend.