Slashdot Mirror
Planet At Risk of Heading Towards Irreversible 'Hothouse Earth' State (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: What we do in the next 10-20 years will determine whether our planet remains hospitable to human life or slides down an irreversible path to what scientists in a major new study call "Hothouse Earth" conditions. Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare where the global average temperatures is 4 to 5 degrees Celsius higher (with regions like the Arctic averaging 10 degrees C higher) than today, according to the study, "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene," published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sea levels would eventually be 10-60 meters higher as much of the world's ice melts. In these conditions, large parts of the Earth would be uninhabitable. Cutting carbon emissions to limit climate change to 2 degrees C, as proposed in the Paris climate agreement, won't be enough to avoid a "Hothouse Earth," said co-author Johan Rockstrom, executive director of Stockholm Resilience Centre. The reality is that global temperatures aren't driven by human emissions of carbon alone, says Rockstrom -- natural systems such as forests and oceans also play a major role. If global warming reaches 2 degrees C it could trigger a feedback, or "tipping element," in one or more of our natural systems and drive further warming, Rockstrom told Motherboard. To put that into perspective, the recent heat waves and wildfires are being linked to climate change that has raised the global average temperature 1 degree C. The researchers conclude the study on a more uplifting note, saying: "We have the knowledge and ability to act. This is within our control." There are three main areas of action that need to be taken within the next two decades. "The top priority in the coming decade is to aggressively cut carbon emissions and decarbonize our energy systems as quickly as possible," reports Motherboard. "The second priority is to halt deforestation and conversion of nature areas into agricultural production. Forests and other natural areas currently absorb 25 percent of our carbon emissions and this needs to grow." The third action is "to continue to develop technologies to pull carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years." While this last action can be costly, we're starting to see some companies give it a try. A startup called Climeworks recently inaugurated the first system that captures CO2 from the air and converts the emissions into stone, thus ensuring they don't escape back into the atmosphere for the next millions of years.
US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up. I'm sure this will get down-modded since it doesn't pay homage to the proper models, but facts are facts: and when facts and beliefs/models collide - facts win.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
you have to take care of their basic needs first. In America 80% of us live paycheck to paycheck. When you're living hand to mouth you don't really care about 20 years from now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
https://xkcd.com/1732/
Yeah, I know it's a cartoon and not precise scale but it's pretty blatant at the end of it, bad things are coming.
Combine this, with the recent discussion of methane finally escaping in siberia.
https://www.google.com.au/sear...
It's only a matter of time, we're well past the point of no return. I can't really fathom a good analogy, perhaps the titanic? Except 10,000 times larger and moving much, much slower but we're only 6 feet from the ice burg. We're gonna take a little bit to hit it, but rest assured we absoloutely will be hitting that ice burg.
Don't breed, having kids in the future that's coming is only more depressing.
US outsources not only production but also polution.
So tell us, which one of your doomsday scenarios have come truth yet? Ice Caps should have been melted like two times over, a couple of cities are supposed to be under water by now, and little baby seals should be clubbing themselves due to going nuts from all the extra heat they have to experience.
If you believe those were actual scientific predictions you're just listening to hyperbolic rants from climate science deniers, not any actual scientific predictions.
I'm a meteorologist but I've listened to enough geology and paleontology seminars to have a basic understanding of the climatic conditions many millions of years ago. You're correct that carbon dioxide levels have been substantially higher than in the present day and that life flourished under such conditions. The Earth has transitioned between two primary states, an icehouse state and a hothouse state. You can think of these as two equilibrium points in Earth's climate about which there are small oscillations. Displace the climate a bit from one of those equilibrium points and it tends to return back. It's much harder to push the climate to the other equilibrium point because a much larger displacement from the current equilibrium is required.
We're currently in an icehouse Earth, with long periods of glaciation and some brief interglacial periods. We're in one of those interglacial periods right now. Releasing enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and triggering other feedbacks in the climate system might push the Earth to the other equilibrium point. Such a transition might, indeed, be permanent due to the shifting habitable zone on geologic time scales.
I see two potential problems with this. One is that while the hothouse Earth might be conducive to supporting human civilization as it presently exists. The second is that such an abrupt transition period would be incredibly stressful for life in general. We're not currently seeing mass extinctions, but such a severe transition in climate could certainly trigger such an extinction. It seems likely that Earth would recover and life would thrive again in a hothouse Earth. However, in the previous mass extinctions, the recovery has been somewhere in the range of 2-10 million years depending on the severity of the event. The Permian-Triassic extinction came close to wiping out life on Earth and it's not entirely clear what caused this mass extinction.
We humans depend on the ecosystem beneath us to support human life. I don't believe anyone really knows where tipping points are. There's limited geologic evidence of many past transitions and mass extinctions like the aforementioned Permian-Triassic extinction. Even a less severe extinction event would have massive consequences for humanity. We don't really know what it takes to trigger a mass extinction event, but the geologic evidence we do have says it's something we dare not mess with. While I said it's likely life would recover, there's no guarantee it would include us.
We're not seeing mass extinctions and we don't really know what it would take to trigger such an event. Life can certainly thrive on a hothouse Earth, but that's little consolation if humans don't survive the transition. And mass extinctions aren't very kind to apex predators like what humans are.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power. But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem, environmentalists insisted that we dismantle that existing solution, and roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time. Then we can develop renewables at our leisure, and use those to phase out nuclear power as they (and battery technology) become capable of handling our base load requirements.
The low range of the time estimate (10 years) is coincidentally about the amount of time it takes to complete construction of a large nuclear plant. Let's see if environmentalists read this news about the coming doomsday scenario, and take it a a sign to drop opposition to nuclear power. Or if they'd rather let all life on Earth go extinct, than let renewable power temporarily take a back seat to nuclear power.
Yeah thats kind of what frusturates me about the "Its been super hot before and things lived!" talking point. Sure it has, but unless your a serious misanthrope that doesn't want people to exist, it really does well to remember that life also exists around sulphur plumes at the bottom of the ocean, but not people! Hell, theres a good chance we could bio-engineer primitive life that'd cope on venus, maybe even mop up some of the atmosphere a bit so in a few thousand years we could live there. But for the time being, bad for humans.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Just read the comments here and realize we have arrived at stage 3 of the 4-stages of climate disaster denial:
1: "Oh, there is no such thing as a climate change!"
2: "What you see there is just a variation in weather, not climate!"
3: "Well, yes, there is a change, but it's natural, nothing human makes."
4: "Ok, the change is real and we're fucked, but it's too late to do anything anyway."
The great thing about any of those 4 steps is that you needn't change anything in your behaviour. The only thing that kinda bugs me is how quickly we arrived at 3, I was hoping that I'd at least be on my way out before we arrive at "we're fucked", because back in stage 1, I did actually care about the planet. In the meantime I stopped caring. What for? I am old. I have no kids. And if you can't be assed to keep this planet able to sustain life so your kids can live, why the fuck should I care?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
China has a very low birthrate - well under replacement. India, in the last couple years, has become sub-replacement. Mexico is essentially at replacement. So I don't know which "high birthrate" countries you're talking about. Essentially the only countries with high growth populations are in sub-Saharan Africa plus a handful of poor oddballs around the world (Pakistan being the largest of these).
source - note that world average replacement fertility is 2.3, lower in rich countries, higher in poor ones.
You know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
Hot pink, with whale skin hubcaps
And all leather cow interior
And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights (yeah)
And I'm gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour
Gettin' 1 mile per gallon
Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonald's
In the old fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers
And when I'm done sucking down those greaseball burgers
I'm gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
And then I'm gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side
And there ain't a goddamn thing anybody can do about it
You know why, because we've got the bomb, that's why
Two words, nuclear fucking weapons, OK?
Russia, Germany, Romania, they can have all the democracy they want
They can have a big democracy cakewalk
Right through the middle of Tiananmen Square
And it won't make a lick of difference
Because we've got the bombs, OK?
-- Denis Leary - Asshole
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Please stop this childish bickering about who is the real boogeyman. Truth is, this is a global problem and it needs a global solution. Everybody has to start working together to fix civilization, or the planet will break us.
Yes, it's not about saving the planet, it's about saving human civilization. The planet doesn't care and will recover. Hundreds of thousands or millions of years aren't much in astronomical scales. Evolution will do it's thing, life will go on, but it will happen without us because we are not destroying the planet - we are destroying the environment that made it possible for humans to thrive.
Therein lies the problem. No one will work together as long as it is beneficial to offload costs to the commons for their own selfish interests and economic advantage. Those countries that do work together to clean up their act will be outstripped by cheap energy/polluting countries.
When you get right down to it the main problems are globalization and population. That you can "make" goods cheaper on the other side of the world and ship them to the opposite side of the planet "cheaply" completely ignores the environmental cost of all of the vessels used to provide that logistical train, fuel it, support it, etc.. Furthermore, that goods need to be shipped in to support the population of a certain area just means there are too many people in that area.
A globally competitive market destroys the world. Take a look at this map: https://www.marinetraffic.com/...
Zoom out if necessary, and really look at that shit. Its fucking nuts. It can't be sustainable.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if any other species in the history of this planet achieved "intelligence" similar to humans they realized their threat to the existence of life on the planet and quickly re-engineered themselves back into a state of balance with nature, self-consciousness ejected from the corpus like a possessing demon.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Well if you can figure out a way to reduce regulations on nuclear power without the cost cutting resulting in corner cutting and eventually a catastrophe then please share.
It's not an either or situation; even if we reduce regulation to the point that we have one fukushima-scale disaster every decade it would still be better than the amount of harm we're causing with fossil fuels. This is a case of selective risk aversion; you would rather have more cumulative harm caused on a daily basis than have one really big disaster every generation or so. It's stupid.
Luckily we don't even need to lower regulation that much though; there are plenty of things which could be done to massively reduce all the regulatory and legal hurdles without compromising safety.
Nuclear power is heavily regulated because it's really f***ing dangerous if you aren't watching it very carefully. The problem with fission reactors is that even the safest designs we know of require considerable oversight and regular expensive maintenance by very imperfect humans.
This is simply not true. The safest designs we have all default to a failsafe mode which requires no human intervention whatsoever. We just haven't been building any of those. The ones which ARE currently being built aren't quite as safe, but still orders of magnitude safer than the designs we've successfully been operating for 5+ decades.
Not to mention the waste problem, the nuclear weapons problems, the insurance problems, etc. Nuclear has some great benefits but it has some serious problems too which cannot be easily dismissed.
Waste is a solved problem which is again only being held up due to idiotic bickering and bungling by bureaucrats. Yucca mountain was designated in 1987. It took 15 goddamn years for the government to finally approve it, only for Obama to shitcan it another 9 years later. We are now at the 21 year mark - that's 2 DECADES that we could have been safely storing waste - all derailed thanks to politics.
On top of that, existing "waste" can be used as fuel for new generation reactors. You don't even have to move it to yucca; you can literally build a new reactor at the same site as an existing one, do an in-situ decommissioning of the existing reactor, and start feeding the waste into the new reactor. Instead of wasting money moving and buying it you get free fuel for decades.
Weapons have no relevance to reactors, and insurance is a non-issue. If you think either of them is some big impediment you'll have to explain why.
Any more complaints?