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What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change (economist.com)
Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century. But Slashdot reader dryriver shares an article titled "What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change."
No, it is not that Climate Change is a hoax or that the climate science gets it all wrong and Climate Change isn't happening. According to the Economist, it is rather that "Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead assume that carbon will be taken out of the air in order for the world to have a good chance of meeting the 2C target."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
In other words, reducing carbon emissions around the world, creating clean energy from wind farms, driving electrical cars and so forth is not going to suffice to meet agreed upon climate targets at all. Negative emissions are needed. The world is going to overshoot the "maximum 2 degrees of warming" target completely unless someone figures out how to suck as much as 810 Billion Tonnes of carbon out of Earth's atmosphere by 2100 using some kind of industrial scale process that currently does not exist.
That breaks down to 1,785,742,000,000,000 pounds of CO2, "as much as the world's economy produces in 20 years," according to the Economist.
"Putting in place carbon-removal schemes of this magnitude would be an epic endeavour even if tried-and-tested techniques existed. They do not."
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Clean coal is magical
guess what, trees are made out of carbon so when they die all the carbon they absorbed gets released back in to the environment, unless you cut them all down before they die and make lumber or paper or some other product out of them
Drat! Trees are completely unsuitable for removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Damn you "some guy on the internet", for pointing out the obvious flaw in the plan.
Now we have to come up with some other solution.
When Carter was president of the US (late 70's), he was trying to get Climate Change on the national radar, but then Regan got elected and he stopped any action that could have had a chance of making a significant impact.
I remember as a kid him saying something like "We need to start now, otherwise we will not have enough time". Well I guess all young people can do now is try and live on high ground and I would say various coastal cities need to re-evaluate where to build new high-rises.
Of course now it seems coastal real-estate is hotter then I have ever seen it. So, seems the future looks gloomy.
One is now a paleoclimatologist specializing in tree rings, the other a historical hydrologist. Between one thing and another, I still get together with them a couple times a year. When climate change/global warming comes up in the course of conversation, they have a lot to say, but one thing comes through quite clearly even when they don't say it outright. (And they have both said it outright to me at different times.) They're scared. And despite both being married, neither has any children. Make of my anecdote what you will.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
The problem is that global warming will render large populated portions of the globe inhospitable to human life, and there will not be a comparable "expansion" as some imagine in fantasy. Those people don't just die, the become environmental refugees as everything in the environment gets disrupted. Diseases spread by new vectors, and spread to new areas. Think a lot more.
But this isn't generally what's being portrayed to the public at large by politicians all over the world (event most Green political parties aren't being honest with the public because no-one likes Debbie Downers, even if they're really more like Cassandra).
People (mainly politicians and the business elite) carry on like the Paris climate agreement is a really strong step towards preventing climate change and we just need to ramp things up a bit more. But we're actually really really far away from having solved it.
If we don't allow for any (serious / industrial-scale) carbon sequestration, then all human carbon emissions on the planet need to be 0 by 2020. In other words carbon emissions in 2018 need to be half this years, then 2019 need to be half of that, and 2020 needs to be 0.
Even if we take a geoengineering approach, eg make artificial clouds to increase albedo and reflect heat, we're still pumping more and more CO2 into the air, which mostly ends up in the oceans, leading to acidification and destruction of aquatic ecosystems. A large number of people in the world have seafood as one of their primary nutrition sources, and many fish stocks are already under threat from overfishing.
Oh please... I'm not a denailist. But let's be serious, a lot of the people promoting Global Warming also tell you (if you listen/read long enough into the rhetoric they're spewing) that their plans can't work, were never going to work, and that it's probably hopeless. You really think those dunces were ever trying to help when they're literal nihilists? No. They were trying to make a buck.
While it's helpful for a number of reasons to plant trees, note that humans put about 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias from seed to maturity in one year, every single year.
A mature 100 acre woodland captures enough carbon annually to offset seven automobiles driven an average amount.
So while trees help for many reasons like flood and erosion control, and can be part of a strategy to reduce fossil fuel emissions (e.g. by cooling cities), they're not really a attractive climate engineering option for bulk removal of CO2. Fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton production is more easily scalable, but has potentially devastating side effects.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sadly it seems it doesn't matter; only money seems to matter. Around where I live, I've seen at least 100 acres of forest razed in the past year to put up shopping centers and subdivisions. And yes I mean forests - there is plenty of blighted urban area around, but instead of re-using that, they are razing forests...
It's like there isn't even any consideration of how this will affect the overall environment - what happens is the city planners say "sweet, we'll get property tax revenue on 300 more housing units!" and forget about all the ancillary effects. They even gloss over the short term effects like massive increases in traffic (putting 300 new residential units in an already congested area is baffling), how can you expect them to consider effects on climate change that will manifest over 50-100 years?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
According to this link and taking some round numbers, an Albizzia lebbek can sequester 70 lbs of CO2 per year.
Assuming a 40-year project lifetime, we would then need 637,765,000,000 trees to pull the mentioned amount out of the atmosphere.
For comparison, the Amazon rainforest has an estimated 390 billion trees.
Dividing these two numbers indicates that the world would have to plant and grow [the equivalent of] 1.6 Amazon Rainforests for a 40 year period.
I'm not saying that this is a bad solution, only that it is an incomplete solution. We should probably plant trees in areas where it makes sense and is easy to do, but we'll still need an epic-level solution to the problem.
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad solution, only that it is incomplete. It should be used in conjunction with as many other scaled-up solutions as we can come up with.
There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
The bigger issue is things like food shortage -- all those plants and animals we like to eat have a good chance of not being able to survive in a significantly changed climate. It likely won't kill humans off (we'll find the species that can survive and farm the hell out of them..) but it will significantly reduce our quality of life when the only things left on the menu are horse meat and GMO algae blooms. And only enough of that to feed a billion people, leaving the other (by that time) 8 or 9 billion to slowly starve to death.
I'm guessing by your tone that you were mostly joking but still.. there are serious issues to consider and we're absolutely looking at a mass extinction event if we don't find a way to undo the damage, and just hoping that we're not among the species to disappear.
If you extrapolate current emission scenarios to 2100 with no artificial carbon scrubbing, you end up with below 1000 ppm CO2. Basic science tells us that even such an unrealistic scenario gives us perhaps 3C warming over current conditions. In the past, when there have been such carbon concentrations, mammalian life was flourishing and primates became established. But that scenario is unrealistic anyway because economies are already motivated to reduce emissions all by themselves: fossil fuels are expensive, and they are getting more expensive the more we use them up. That drives both energy efficiency and renewable energies. In reality, we're probably going to end up with maybe 600 ppm CO2, leaving us with less than 2C temperature increase.
The problem with climate science isn't the science, it's the fear mongering, corruption, and politics people misuse the science for. Yes, carbon emission growth and temperature increases are real, but Paris is not the answer. In fact, government attempts to intervene are likely going to make things worse rather than better.
You mean this Roy Spencer
https://skepticalscience.com/R...
right ?
What is it with the slashdot crowd and the "lone wolf" saviour thing ? Is it just the usual right wing astro turfing, or do they really think that it's normal for lots and lots of scientists to be wrong AND lie about it, but that one person is the real purveyor of truth.
Roy Spencer is right but 95% of the climate scientists on the planet are wrong ? really?
We're dumping GIGA tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, a heat trapping gas, and it's doing NOTHING ?
oh wait, I forgot it's all natural variability. oh that's awesome, i'm glad you thought of that. before Roy Spencer came along nobody thought to check to see if maybe this warming is due to natural variability. wow- what a brilliant insight !
Well, all of those lying climate scientists on their big fat research paychecks showed that it isn't natural variability, but THEY'RE ALL WRONG. and they're liars. and Al Gore is fat.
Absolute statements are never true
#2 interesting point. Any links that show how much h20 would be released if every car was a hydrogen fuel car and whether that would be a significant impact?
Unlike CO2, atmospheric H20 concentrations are determined by temperature, so if more H20 is added that isn't supported by temperature it would condense out...at least that's the laymans science version I believe.
From what I can see, water vapor concentrations are 1000x that of CO2 so it would take considerably more to have the effect. That being mitigated somewhat by the different greenhouse gas strength of the 2 gases but they aren't 1000x different.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Those were predictions of absolute worst case scenarios. Few scientists took them seriously but of course the media would rather report on unlikely sensational worst case scenarios rather then the slow burning disaster that most mainstream models predict
Phosphorous is a bigger issue than Nitrogen. We are already to soon have an agricultural shortage of Phosphorous.
Just because it is hard, or some would even say impossible to avoid the 2 C temperature increase, doesn't mean we should not try to do our best.
If it ends up the temperature raises by "only" 4 C instead of say, 7 C if we give up all efforts, it's still a big win.
People (mainly politicians and the business elite) carry on like the Paris climate agreement is a really strong step towards preventing climate change and we just need to ramp things up a bit more. But we're actually really really far away from having solved it.
They've known it was a practical impossibility from the start. They know that humans will do the same thing they've done every other time climate (or other major events/conditions) change. They will adapt.
Meanwhile, said politicians and others with wealth & power will use it as scare-mongering to drive the public in the direction they want to further their own political/ideological agendas increase their own wealth and power.
The discussion should be centering around adaptation to changing climate, not attempts to somehow 'lock in' current climate, as if that were possible.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Sure, models are simplifications - but in this case the models are off by more than twice their error bars. And they continue to diverge even further. At what point do we choose to ignore what the "models say for the future" and go all-in on new models? Or do we keep basing decisions on the outputs of provably inaccurate models? If you were doing a circuit based upon V=I^3/R^5, and your data as you increased I for a given R was way off from what your model, at what point would you stop, examine the data and basic theories, and try to build another model?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
On the other hand, the cost of nuclear power in the USA is pretty much 95% the fault of Democrats. Various Democrat sub-groups came up with a plan to use the courts to make nuclear power too expensive, and it worked. This has been very well known for about 3 decades now, despite nonstop gaslighting to push the myth that the cost of nuclear power is either a mystery or the natural consequence of physics or engineering.
See that "Preview" button?
assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
uh-huh. You get to assume that the lone wolf is correct, but if I argue that knowledgeable people, who have studied the problem are correct i'm engaging in some sort of "if all your friends jumped in a lake" argument.
"my friends" believe CAGW because knowledgeable people who have studied the problem believe it.
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you
Do you even know what "appeal to authority" as an argument means ?
if i tell you that quantum physics is real because a bunch of physicist think it's real, is that an appeal to authority ?
Description: Using an authority as evidence in your argument when the authority is not really an authority on the facts relevant to the argument.
climate scientist are, in fact, an authority on the facts relevant to the argument.
Well, we can at least halfway agree here. I'll let you ponder on which half.
No we're not agreeing halfway on anything. You make false and disingenuos arguments. we have nothing to agree about. you're denying reality because of some bullshit worldview.
Absolute statements are never true
Hydrogen, is short term at least, not a solution. Neither for burning nor for fuel cells.
Producing Hydrogen makes it nearly as expensive as gasoline. And: you need to produce it. It costs a lot of energy.
Long term it could be a solution when we have enough solar/wind power to produce it. But then again we simply can use batteries instead of building up an hydrogen infrastructure. Or create hydrogen and feed it into the gas grid.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There's an easier solution to rising water -- move further inland. Its not like the 6 or 10 or whatever it is these days foot rise will happen over night.
Does not work for plenty of people/countries/islands.
Look on a damn map.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Can both of you please post your data so those of us with more than a handful of brain cells can pick through it and determine which of you may be right?
That's not to exclude you from the pool of people with more than a handful of brain cells but, rather, to point out that we're not likely to just take your word for it. Which you'd realize if those cells were present and functional, of course.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
How insane is it that this climate panic has lead you to pondering mass murder.
In the 70's they where predicting a new ice age, media just report what scares people because that sells.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Wow, these democrats are really powerful—they managed to influence even the construction of nuclear reactors in Finland!
The Olkiluoto reactor #3 has been a spectacular failure for years. Works started in 2005, slated to finish in 2010 for 3 billion €. Works are still unfinished, with completion slated for 2019 at 8.5 billion € (barring further fuck-ups, which at this point have become a habit).
Building the plant is not some Finnish farmer, it's Areva and Siemens, top-notch companies in the nuclear industry. If that's what nuclear can provide, well some politicians looking for a humongous boondoggle may be happy with that, but I as a consumer and taxpayer, not so much.
Your link appears to be mostly a whining rant about how terrible it is that nuclear power plants are forced to respect minimum standards of environmental decency: this, in particular, blew my mind [my bold]:
So as long as it's not commercially harvested, it's all right to exterminate species in the ocean? The temperature may seem mild to us, but higher temperatures do reduce oxygen content in water, and for every GW of power out of nuclear power plant there are 2 GW of heat; that could have altered the ecosystem significantly. Look at the location of the Seabrook, NH plant: it is right on the inside of Hampton Harbor, which has a very narrow inlet. Heat would easily accumulate in there over time. And boo-hoo, they had to build 2 miles of pipe, cry me a river.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Those who hold a deep green philosophy would be against nuclear, and well anything which might allow for current rates of consumption to continue. The point of cutting carbon is to force a reduction in production of, well, everything.
And of course these are people who do not live what they preach.
As an environmentalist working in carbon credits explained to me, it does not matter what the truth about CO2 may be - as long as it forces a reduction in production of everything, a reduction in consumption and greed.
Environmentalism is being dragged backwards into the realms of irrationality and ideology.
Meanwhile the big companies can use it to their own profit.
So we never get a sane energy policy.
Although I am seeing the term “ecomodernist” appear, maybe in reaction to the “eco romantics” and “deep greens”.
I've heard this before. It's used often as an argument, and it works now with me just about as well as it worked on my parents when I was in high school. I don't care if all your friends believe in CAGW, that just makes a lot of people wrong, assuming Roy Spencer is correct.
Why would we assume that?
Make an argument on CAGW that is not an appeal to authority then I might believe you. What would help a lot to convince me is a focus on finding solutions.
That reeks of intellectual dishonesty. Do you also refuse to believe in diseases that don't have cures?
And whose problem is it, if you don't accept the reality of CO2 driven climate change? Because it sounds like you are trying to make it our problem: a classic burden of proof fallacy. If you have some better explanation as to what happens when the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are doubled, feel free to post that explanation, along with observational proof.
Actually this is already very doable without any need for GMOing or patenting life. It's called pasture with managed rotational grazing. Trees pull about 1.4 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere a year. Managed rotationally grazed pasture pulls double that and produces a side benefit of natural, organic fertilizer spread on the land by the animals and meat to eat.
Save the planet - eat more (pastured) meat.
We should stop worrying. It's already too late to stop warming, and it will correct itself in 100-200 years when oil and coal run out.
Long before this was a popular topic, I worried about what the planet would look like when billions of Asians start living like Americans. That time is now and for the next 50 years. Someday India, China, Africa and South America will have as many cars per capita as Americans. As soon as they make enough money they will want what everyone else has, and it will be sold to them. So as far as warming -- you ain't seen nothin' yet.
The end game is when oil/gas/coal run out. I'm guessing 100-200 years, but who knows? Humans will have to live on much more expensive nuclear power. That means population reduction and the earth will slowly return to a more natural state.