Planet At Risk of Heading Towards Irreversible 'Hothouse Earth' State (vice.com) 1159
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.
Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The direction doesn't matter much, for the USA is still a bigger "carbon pig" per capita than those countries. The fact your linked article failed to disclose that makes me reluctant to trust their objectivity, being it's a key metric when comparing countries.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because a lot of those countries simply export their carbon emissions; that is, they switch to domestic industries like service industries that are low carbon and simply move production of carbon intensive goods to other countries. The US is so large and diverse that that's not an option.
In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average. Calling the US a "carbon pig" given those facts makes little sense.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. The Earth doesn't give a fuck about $GDP.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
And if you impose additional carbon taxes, it really changes very little, since pretty much all prices for all products will go up.
Wrong. If you add carbon taxes, products with MORE carbon will increase more in price, and there will be a bigger market incentive to produce and buy low-carbon products. If you believe in free market economics, a carbon tax (without loopholes) is the best way to deal with this.
Re: (Score:3)
Per capita doesn't matter to the planet or atmospheric physics. Total carbon emission does.
The only people who care about per capita emissions above total emissions are those attempting some sort of social engineering.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
So it needs to be 100% or nothing? Incremental progress isn't good enough, so why bother at all?
You are part of the problem here.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
US externalities are way up
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Funny)
So the trade war with China should help.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Funny)
So the trade war with China should help.
See... Trump does care about the environment after all.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do what the EU did and introduce regulations like RoHS and include carbon emitted overseas in the manufacture of goods for the US market when calculating carbon taxes etc.
We just told the Chinese that we weren't allowing lead in most products solder here any more, and they stopped using lead in those products and manufacturing processes.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
facts win.
Unless the mods can hide them before anyone finds out.
it is called outsourcing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:4, Informative)
The US drop in emissions is a one-time bonus from replacement of coal by natural gas. It's a good start, but just a start.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Electrification (Score:3)
What the US should be doing is building nuclear power plants
Won't happen. Politically it's just a non-starter for a variety of well understood reasons. People are scared of nuclear power regardless of whether or not they should be. I think you'll only see heavy use of nuclear fission in places where political dissent can be suppressed (like China) or where it is use of nuclear fission is already dominant (like France).
Get rid of fossil fool use for transport.
I think this will happen fairly naturally actually though perhaps not fast enough. I just bought a Chevy Bolt recently and it seems obvious to me
Re: (Score:3)
For all its benefits, pure unbridled capitalism and greed are the ultimate root causes of this problem. When we are willing to spend $1,000 of our great grandchildrens' birthright to get a $1 today, everyone on this planet needs to ask themselves why we do it. If we as a species really don't care, maybe natural selection and mass extinction will be the unpleasant answer.
Re: Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear isn't the answer. It was promised to be too cheap to meter, instead it is the most costly to generate.
Translation: we've spent decades demonizing and regulating nuclear to the point where it's too expensive to generate. We've made sure it can't be the answer.
Well done guys. The planet thanks you.
Re: Flaws in the technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
Wind, solar and grid storage have already trashed coal and are in the process of out competing natural gas.
Excellent! Now that the problem is solved we can all go on and ignore this. I mean we'll have to keep building more wind and solar but that's just going to happen naturally now that wind and solar are cheaper than coal.
I don't understand all the concern then. Freischutz says we got this all figured out.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Wind, solar and grid storage have already trashed coal and are in the process of out competing natural gas.
Then why, in spite of your country's massive spending and subsidies on wind and sun, its carbon output crept steadily upward as coal and Russsian gas replace nuclear? By now, the sheer weight of Euros was supposed to be making the sun shine all winter.
Re:Follow the lead of the USA (Score:5, Informative)
This is nonsense.
This is power generation in Germany from coal and lignite from 1990-2018 in TWh.
coal 140,8 147,1 143,1 138,4 134,6 146,5 140,8 134,1 137,9 142,0 124,6 107,9 117,0 112,4 116,4 127,3 118,6 117,7 112,2 92,6
lignite 170,9 142,6 148,3 154,8 158,0 158,2 158,0 154,1 151,1 155,1 150,6 145,6 145,9 150,1 160,7 160,9 155,8 154,5 149,5 147,5
Also the CO2 emission from electricity production decreased from 315 Mio t CO2 emission in 2010 (before shutting down a couple of nukes in response to Fukishima) to 285 Mio t CO2 in 2017. At the same time power production increased from 564 TWh to 583 TWh.
Re: Follow the lead of the USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
So, say we did gas the left.
Aside from the reduction in population, you would have a worse situation.
The right has been saying "the market will solve it", "drill, baby, drill", etc.
The right has fought requiring anything to be more fuel efficient, less polluting.
The right has fought looking at the problem or attempting to do anything about it.
The right has been pretty consistent in denying that there is a problem.
( if you disagree with the above, tell me about stuff that is not outliers, policy advancements
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the Environmental Protection Agency reports that the U.S. reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 2 percent in 2016.
You may want to consider it's not 2016 now, with a different policy approach to the climate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
If you were truely worried about per capitia emissions, then America would not matter. Hell, we are around 14 tonnes / person AND DROPPING, while You are now over 9 tonnes / person and continuing to rise. But, more importantly, you would go after the other nations that are MUCH higher than America. Some of them are up as high as 38 tonnes / person. I do not see you as gripping about that.
Basically, you are a rasicst pig who thinks that by going afte
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Not true (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Not true (Score:3, Informative)
False (Score:3)
That's completely false. China alone generates almost twice what we do https://www.ucsusa.org/global-... [ucsusa.org]
Now per capita they generate much less which is pretty scary given the rate they're developing at and the number of people they have.
Re: (Score:3)
"only fucking idiots like you..."
It seems weird to me that somebody who has a signature lamenting a supposed lack of honor today communicates like you do.
Re: (Score:3)
As it is porky/red tide, if you REALLY were concerned about per person, then America would not even hold a candle. We are between 11-14, so we are down there.
In terms of emission per $
Re: (Score:3)
if you REALLY were concerned about per person, then America would not even hold a candle.
Except that America is the largest consumer of Chinese goods. If we were really concerned about emissions, we'd at minimum place a carbon tax on Chinese imports.
Re: Not true (Score:4, Insightful)
Well if you use meaningless measurements like that I guess you're technically right.
Technically correct is the best kind of correct. When you make decisions, you make them based on facts, not on wishes.
But with more than 4x the population and less than twice the CO2. Anyone with a handful of working neurons will understand China is cleaner than America when it comes to CO2.
No, that is the opposite of what it says. If China emits more CO2, then China is dirtier than America when it comes to CO2. You might claim that the average Chinese citizen is cleaner, but that would be a meaningless claim, since most pollution is emitted by industry and not by individuals.
Re: Follow the lead of the USA (Score:4, Insightful)
US emissions are down. But they are 'down' to twice the level of China and even higher still than the EU.
Follow the lead of America if you don't give 2 shits about what happens to the planet.
Misleading at best (Score:3)
Re:I'll believe the politicians believe ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [worldbank.org] - note that world average replacement fertility is 2.3, lower in rich countries, higher in poor ones.
Re: (Score:3)
You have clearly - whether you're aware of it or not - implied that the world's population isn't growing. Perhaps you should start over?
Re: (Score:3)
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.
The relevant measure isn't today's replacement rates -- babies generally don't crawl across borders. Looking at birth statistics for people now approaching 30 [worldbank.org], India's birthrate was 4.0, China's was 2.6, and Mexico's was 3.7. We'll be dealing with the hangover from that era for quite some time. And even today's rates show that the globe's net population growth is generally constrained to developing countries, so migration pressures aren't going away any time soon.
Re: USA not entire clean in this matter .... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: USA not entire clean in this matter .... (Score:5, Insightful)
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/... [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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
.... really look at that shit. Its fucking nuts. It can't be sustainable.
....
That map is an illusion. Those ship markers are large in proportion to the size of the oceans and land masses, but in reality the craft they represent are extremely small in proportion. Cross an ocean in a sail boat for 3,000 nautical miles and you'd be lucky to see more than two or three other vessels during the whole trip, even while in shipping lanes.
There is a similar map showing the location of most aircraft around the world. Zoom out the Flightradar24 map to show the entire world and the aircraft
Re: (Score:3)
If you want folks to give a damn about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
you have to take care of their basic needs first. In America 80% of us [google.com] live paycheck to paycheck. When you're living hand to mouth you don't really care about 20 years from now.
Some of that is poverty, but most of that is personal finance. For whatever reason a lot of people can't save money, give them a raise and you'll raise their standard of living, but they'll still be living paycheck to paycheck.
You can't wait until you've fixed every other problem on the planet until you start addressing global warming, you need to start fixing it now.
Re:If you want folks to give a damn about this (Score:4, Informative)
And the evidence that they were right keeps piling up. Climate science has gotten a lot better and we're seeing massive chunks of ice already falling into the seas at a rate we've never witnessed.
There is no crying wolf here, there's just a massive amount of misinformation that's being spread by industry shills. Had we actually taken steps decades ago, we likely wouldn't be seeing the effects anywhere near as strongly. It would also likely have been a lot less expensive and a lot less of an impact on our lives.
Instead, we allowed the fossil fuel industry to bribe politicians and spread lies about the impact of carbon emissions on the atmosphere and now we're all starting to pay the price.
We're already seeing an uptick in civil unrest and weather related catastrophes, at some point shouldn't you shills admit that maybe this is a massive problem that needs to be solved rather than saying fuck it, it's too late may as well just keep on doing what we were doing.
One step short of Pizza Pocket Earth (Score:2)
XKCDs timeline is quite horrific looking (Score:5, Interesting)
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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... [google.com.au]
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.
Early Eocene (Score:4, Insightful)
It's only a matter of time, we're well past the point of no return.
Really? Well someone should have told that to the planet in the early Eocene then when temperatures were +12-14C above current levels [wikipedia.org]. Somehow it reversed that trend and cooled down considerably.
Global warming is a serious problem and we absolutely do need to combat it because if we don't it will cause massive political destabilization as food production changes, populations move, water resources change, cities flood etc. However, claiming that it's the "end of the world" because it is irreversible and will make the planet inhospitable to human life is complete crap and counterproductive because it leads to dispair rather than action.
Re: (Score:3)
Past the point of no return for the survival of humans.
Humans live in sub-saharan Africa. No climate change model I have ever seen suggests that the Earth is going to warm by even vaguely close to the amount that the entire surface will be warmer than places that humans already inhabit and thrive in. Get a grip. Climate change is a very serious problem that is going to cause huge upheaval if we do not get it under control but nothing suggests that it is going to make life impossible for humans.
Re: (Score:3)
Not exactly the best example of nothing to worry about.
I never said it was nothing to worry about - in fact if you read my comment I said exactly the opposite: it is plenty to worry about. However, bad as it may be the survivability of the human race is not one of those things which is what the article claimed.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:XKCDs timeline is quite horrific looking (Score:5, Interesting)
Models don't "have errors." They model exactly what they're designed to model.
You don't sound like a person who understands what statistical models are even used for.
How could you possibly be a statistician when you can't even comprehend the metaphysics of a mathematical model? I'll give you a hint about them: They're not promises.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see how statistical models applies here. The main climate models are physical models, not statistical models.
Re:XKCDs timeline is quite horrific looking (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that the original hockey stick model only came out about 20 years ago in 1998 it sounds like your complaint is just hyperbolic bullshit.
The hockey stick of temperature rise is happening all around us currently. The steepness of the current rise looks dramatic on the graph compared to the relatively mild temperature changes that came before it but it's still only around 0.2 degrees per decade which doesn't seem that dramatic on human time scales. But it is a pretty dramatic change on geological time scales and far beyond the pace of change that the natural world can keep up with without substantial disruption.
Upside (Score:2, Insightful)
The upside is it will be so obvious that Republicans cannot deny it's happening.
However, they'll probably blame it on Democrats somehow, maybe claiming that catering to LGBTQ made God angry, who then baked Earth as punishment. You think I'm joking, don't you? [independent.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
California is burning down. Houston and New York have both been hit by historic hurricanes in the last couple of years. Parts of Florida are already being overrun with rising oceans. Yet I still see a page of denialists right here, let alone bought and paid for Republicans. We're screwed.
Social aspects of global warming (Score:2)
Just ask the dinosaurs (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It was a good movie, I dunno what people are so scared of.
I've heard that before (Score:3, Insightful)
We've had 5-10 years [newsbank.com] left to save the planet for the last 30 years [dailycaller.com] or so... The numbers may change [telegraph.co.uk], but the — unsubstantiated — message is always the same...
We already have (had) a solution to this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Won't happen even if it should (Score:3, Insightful)
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power.
Solves one problem but causes others. And it is a political non-starter. Fortunately solar and wind + batteries can take up most of the slack if we push them hard enough.
But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem
Have you solved the nuclear waste problem? Do you have a reactor design that cannot render a large area uninhabitable in a serious failure? Have you figured out how to get the cost down to competitive levels without requiring government insurance guarantees? Have you figured out how to restore areas contaminated by the occasional but i
Re: (Score:3)
What they're talking about here is that old-geneation nuclear plants don't run very hot. Those using river water as a heat sink can lose efficiency if the river gets too warm in summer. The same is true of any thermal power plant that runs at the same temperature.
Using molten salt as a coolant instead of water enables a nuclear plant to run hotter, providing a Carnot heat differential that will remain efficient at any heat sink temperature on Earth.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Nuclear costs about 4-8 times the cost of solar and wind in the US.
No Nuclear does not. Nuclear projects governed by the regulations in place do.
Also, you're extremely wrong on which country invested heavily in nuclear. France kicked the USA's ass on that
Just checking, nope I didn't say anywhere the country which invested most. Just that the USA invested heavily in nuclear. That must be my USA the one that still has 20% of the energy mix nuclear, and not your USA which apparently didn't play with atoms at all.
and France is also abandoning nuclear plants that are under construction because they cost too much compared to "alternative" sources.
The government and regulations are not local. I didn't say "USA" I said Governments. In this case the international governance bodies which oversee these nuclear projects.
Nuclear has never been cheap.
Onl
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the cost is due to regulatory bullshit. Don't get me wrong - it's important to get this shit right. But clowns actively attack any and all attempts to build a nuke plant with FUD and bullshit. With modern plant designs it's pretty much impossible for your doomsday meltdown / China syndrome scenarios to play out. Further, even if it is expensive, so what? Is global warming - sorry, AGW - an ECONOMIC issue? Or is it a REAL, ENVIRONMENTAL issue? If it's a real, environmental issue I'm all for sub
Or, ya know... cut human overpopulation? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've read that a human population with all modern technologies is fully sustainable to a limit of 500 million. How far past that sustainable limit are we now, and still living in denial of this 800-pound gorilla sitting on top of the solution to nearly all the problems of human civilization?
Good luck with that denial, people. The population reduction is coming one way or another....
Re: (Score:3)
You sound a lot like the eugenicists of the 1920s: "sitting around for decades doing nothing, burning up resources" == "useless eaters"
I'm at least relieved knowing that you won't be making any executive decisions about it. You know nothing about the elderly, yet you're all too happy to make make blanket declarations about them and throw them under the bus first.
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (Score:2)
The associated period of massi
I always thought this to be ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... the more plausible scenario. The reverse albedo effect is already taking effect and we're still adding to the carbon circle big time. Trumpistan and the wider world is still blissfully unaware of what's happening, as are the idiots here in my country dragging their heels with solar and driving ever larger luxury Audi's and Porsches and Daimlers, each and everybody on his own, at the same time.
The current heatwave in Germany beats everything we've seen so far. It feels like I'm on the equator. Today they forecast 37ÂC, the highest temperature yet in my region and it's only going to get worse.
I'm beyond caring (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
The common thread is people saying no to totalitarianism — whether we believe your stories about the future or we don't.
The climate alarmists decided to ally with politicians and pundits and activists who have been shitting on a substantial fraction of the US population for 50 years. Guess that didn't work out.
The Onion's take (Score:3)
Climate Researchers Warn Only Hope For Humanity Now Lies In Possibility They Making All Of This Up [theonion.com]
Re: (Score:3)
So not reversible on anything approaching a convenient timescale.
Do you think you and your pals can hole up at Galt's Gulch for a few thousand years?
Re: (Score:2)
It was much warmer than this before. Then it cooled. Therefore the "irreversible" claim has already been falsified.
The irreversible part is that it's going to get a lot warmer and we can't prevent that from happening (without taking some pretty drastic measures in the next decade or two). Not that it will never cool down again. On human time scales you might as well call it irreversible because it will be many generations before it really starts cooling again.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if there was a Triceratops Malthus. I wonder if there was a Triceratops you.
It's a hoax started by the Brachiosaurs. So much for science.
Re: (Score:2)
Umm... you DO know the law of entropy, yes?
Re: (Score:2)
While I would like to agree, we kind of bumbled our way into this one. While I dont think we are quite there yet, I'm not so sure we are ready to tackle a runaway scenario.
In 66 years, 1903-1969, we went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon. And the pace of scientific and engineering progress has accelerated since then. Much of that aerospace progress was made in the era of paper, pencil and slide rules. Our smart watches have more computation power than 1969 Apollo mission computers.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't reduce heat energy, you move it by radiating it to space and/or block it before it arrives from the Sun. The Earth is not a closed system.
In theory it is quite possible, in practice, well there's a lot of inertia in something as large as the Earth's climate and the odds of screwing up seem high.
Re:Seems a bit Malthusian ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you want some proof? I'll just copy a previous post I made and you can verify it yourself.
2015-2017 are the hottest years on record on Earth. Citation: https://public.wmo.int/en/medi... [wmo.int] and multiple countries and weather stations confirmed this
2018 is looking to be #4, but we can't actually say that without actually going through the whole year obviously; but last April was the third warmest on record: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/... [nasa.gov]
The higher temperatures are affecting all crops, but their effects ar
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Your "warmest year on record" reflects only very modern history. Just take a look at this chart on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and tell me how our warmth is both irreversible and human-caused (parent did not specifically address this so I apologize for bringing it to my reply... it's not an attack on the parent but on the usual narrative). We find ourselves in the Holocene, a remarkable interglacial period marking the end of the last ice age nearly 8,000 years ago. What we should not worry about is runaway heating, because h
Re:TFA Is Hot Aie (Score:4, Informative)
What we should not worry about is runaway heating, because history has shown some built-in feedback mechanism that eventually reverses the trend. The next ice age is probably inevitable; we might as well enjoy the temperate climate while we can.
It's not some built in feedback mechanism that has been driving the cycle of glaciations/interglacials lately. Milankovitch cycles are the apparent triggering mechanism for the changes. After that then feedbacks do have an effect on the magnitude of the changes but it's not a feedback that initiates the changes. As far as the end of our interglacial and the start of the next glacial period climate scientists have calculated that CO2 levels would have to drop down to around 240 ppm for that to happen. So as long as CO2 levels are above 300 ppm we don't have to worry about the next ice age.
Re:more doomsday garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Supressing the urge to laugh hysterically at how flawed this is, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that you may have meant something else, do you want to try and clarify that point just a bit? Because as it stands, that conclusion does not follow from the premise unless you believe that humans can travel backwards in time.
Re: (Score:2)
But what happena when we run out of ice?
No more boat drinks, but we'll live on boats in the drink. Like Waterworld.
Re: (Score:2)
Even President W liked the umbrella idea. Definitely better than Cheney's moon mirrors.
But what happens when hackers get in and hold the planet hostage? What if Bruce Willis is too old to pass the pre-launch physical and can't save the planet?
Re:FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Now, you raise a different question, namely whether a rapid rise in global average temperatures by 4-5C would lead to mass extinctions. There have been many such temperature increases in the past, and they were not usually associated with mass extinctions. Mass extinctions are extremely rare and seem to require multiple factors to coincide.
We ARE currently living in the middle of a mass extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We have limited information about the cause of past extinction events, but we've got some good evidence that climate change played a major role in some of them. When the ocean heats up and stores more CO2, it gets more acidic, and shells get weaker for many sea creatures. That can lead to extinctions at the bottom of the food chain, and those can quickly propagate through the rest of the ecosystem. In the case
Re:Apocalyptic my ass. Healing! (Score:4, Funny)
True that. Like in the old joke.
Two planets meet. Said the one
"You look terrible, what's wrong?"
"Oh, I have homo sapiens."
"Ah. Don't worry, I had that too. It's gonna pass."
Re:I love my gas guzzling truck. (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re: (Score:3)
Apparently, Japan and Europe continue to sell coal plants to other nations as well. America no longer does. Nor have we built any in something like 10 years.