Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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)
You seem to forget that there's this engine for replacing trees that die with other trees, thus keeping the carbon bound up on a larger scale. In the old days, we called them "forests".
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.
More forests. Reforest what's been taken for other purposes.
Also, forests have this amazing ability to increase the amount of CO2 they sequester over time, as the forest floor grows deeper. Some of the carbon in mulch is released, but not all, which makes a positive and growing difference as a forest ages.
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
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.
Biochar.
Burn wood or other biomass in a very low-oxygen environment and you get charcoal. Dig the charcoal into the soil and you get more fertile soil, but the carbon acts as a "fertility catalyst" rather than a fertilizer - it's not consumed, and it doesn't decay. It'll be there for centuries (millenia?) unless you get the dirt hot enough to ignite the charcoal.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, no it doesnt (well, the actual fact is some of it does, most of it does not).
BURNING wood puts most of it back.
In case you dont realise, dirt actually holds quite a bit of carbon. Dirt is mostly rotted plants.
This is also why grasslands absorb (and hold!) quite a lot of carbon, grass grows fast and dies often.
Funny, that.
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
Go into an tropical jungle, e.g. Amazonas. The mulch is not even 30cm thick
30 cm times the area of the Amazon rain forests is a huge volume of bound carbon. And for many other types of forests, the layer is quite substantially thicker. And has a large impact too.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
Quoting Wikipedia:
The peatland ecosystem is the most efficient carbon sink on the planet,[2] because peatland plants capture CO2 naturally released from the peat, maintaining an equilibrium. In natural peatlands, the "annual rate of biomass production is greater than the rate of decomposition", but it takes "thousands of years for peatlands to develop the deposits of 1.5 to 2.3 m [4.9 to 7.5 ft], which is the average depth of the boreal [northern] peatlands".[2]
[2]: Hugron, Sandrine; BussiÃres, Julie; Rochefort, Line (2013). Tree plantations within the context of ecological restoration of peatlands: practical guide (PDF) (Report). Laval, Québec, Canada: Peatland Ecology Research Group (PERG). Retrieved 22 February 2014.
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
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.
Nope. That's unlikely.
Coal was a result of the circumstances during the carboniferous period - when wood was a pretty new evolution and nothing had evolved that could eat it yet.
All that carbon that got trapped under ground instead of becoming CO2 again had some pretty weird results - one of which was that the O2 level of the atmosphere reached it's all-time high at over 40%.
In that environment insects and arachnids could grow way bigger than they can in our 21% oxygen atmosphere (book lungs are not very effective - so the size of insects and arachnids depend directly on how much oxygen the atmosphere holds). Hence the famous 1m long dragonfly and other giant invertebrates of the age.
Eventually, bacteria, fungi and insects evolved that could digest wood. Carbon stopped being trapped and, gradually, the atmosphere reverted to it's normal 21% oxygen level.
But new coal is extremely unlikely, even from mulch which isn't fully converted. The trees that became coal were just about 100% unconverted only the leaves got eaten. Mulch is nowhere near that resilient.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *