Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

only newt gingrich had the vision to take us to HD 40307g.

Strange side-effect of the increase in ocean acidification: Ocean Acidification Research Suggests Return To Dinosaur-Era Underwater Acoustics

BTW, if this thread is knocking you down do not search on "ocean acidification." It gives me migraines. Off-the-record most oceano-climate guys agree that warming is already past the event horizon/"I did it 35 minutes ago" line, but that there is a fighting chance to turn the pH level around before it all goes to hell.

I'm guardedly optimistic. Sure, there will be no domestic political will in the U.S. until a major city dies (Cat 5 swamping Miami, Phoenix/Las Vegas running out of water). But the broad outlines of an initial climate deal are well understood: big cuts from developed nations over a couple decades, capping developing nations at current rates, a couple hundred billion a year sent their way to fund wind/solar/nuclear. I wouldn't be surprised at an overall peak around 550 ppm, with serious tipping point sequellae (like Siberian permafrost methane releases) averted only through some serious geoengineering. Loading 10 air force tankers with sulfur dioxide for 3 sorties a day is pretty damn cheap compared to letting the planet go off the rails for the full PETM scenario. Perhaps 50 ppm can be removed through Amazon reforestation and another 50 ppm via industrial scale biochar production. The rest we may just have to cope with for a few thousands of years.

I'm also very hopeful that the initial Moore's Law effect observed in solar energy will turn out to be predictive and we'll see a boom in solar energy akin to the recent computing boom. Not to mention that installing solar panels on every building in the United States would be enough work to keep America employed for years.

waiting for interstellar space-migration once we abandon mother earth, ready to be put into a deep slumber and checked in on occasionally by a robot helper

Yes but solar panel are SO AESTHETICALLY UNAPPEALING.

A New Yorker article from earlier this year on the guy developing an artificial leaf (absorb CO2, output electricity) has a terrifying explanation about how if we raised the standard of living for people in developing countries, they'd get set onto an inevitable course towards greater resource consumption, which of course leads to greater and greater energy demands == doom. That's why short of some radical geoengineering, I don't think that technology can really help, and also why capitalism is untenable (as we rocket towards 9 billion people).

I am dealing with global warming by never having kids and by drinking a lot so I will die early of cirrhosis of the liver

― 乒乓, Sunday, November 4, 2012 2:29 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

+ consume less resources

I think my continued gut reaction to climate change is: this is not the world I grew up in, this is not what they taught us in school

but I'm sure people felt the same way during similar (pardon the pun) sea-changes in our history

brave new world, people

if we raised the standard of living for people in developing countries, they'd get set onto an inevitable course towards greater resource consumption, which of course leads to greater and greater energy demands == doom

They are on an inevitable course already. If 'we' don't get into that market then China or India or somebody else will. Artificial leaf guy should be thrilled at the thought of beating old energy technology to the punch imo.

I think the doom calculations take into account advances like the artificial leaf? Because the story that they tell is that it can only provide so much energy for a certain standard of living; once societies surpass that point, fossil fuels become much more seductive.

NYer article here (paywalled, unfortunately).

i gotta unbookmark this thread. it really never fails to bum me out.

― Mordy, Friday, November 9, 2012 11:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

may have related this story elsewhere on ILX, but I have a friend who went and joined a cult after getting high one night and watching a documentary about peak oil

xp And of course I'm aware of the ethical hypocrisy of being a citizen of a developed country where I already enjoy the standard of living that's driving us off the cliff and suggesting that people living in poverty are the potential problem -- I'm just making an argument for utter DESPAIR.

Seems likely to me that human organizational and technological ability will prolong our global population collapse over the course of a century or more. This will, of course, prolong the period of environmental damage also. When the dust settles, there will still be hundreds of millions of humans, but our present cultures won't survive without major retooling.

Is contraction and convergence still something that people are pushing for? i know it's hugely idealistic, but at the same time it has always struck me as being by far the most equitable way forward.

No doubt some people are pushing for it, but not nearly enough to make it happen. Humanity's alliegance to social equality is superficial compared to their deep, fierce and abiding alliegance to themselves, their family and their tribe.

I do agree with that, but on the other hand our western societies still lurch torwards racial and sexual equality - at least the legislation for it is mostly in place even where our behaviour may lag behind - so maybe we shouldn't be too pessimistic on that front?

Racial and sexual equality don't really require any sacrifices on the part of the power structure, though. Giving up the SUV, on the other hand...

I was discussing global warming with my very religious but liberal father this weekend. He believes that God is sending storms as wake up calls to people to get them to take global warming seriously. He doesn't believe God will allow us to destroy the world, but will modify our behavior through negative consequences. Putting God aside for a second, I think he has a point that as hurricanes and droughts continue to increase, people will become more receptive to changing their behavior and reducing emissions. I only hope that a critical mass gets the message before it's too late to make a meaningful impact.

but the problem is that, the changing of people's behavior is not gonna be a 1:1 reduction in the 'amount' of global warming we see

I mean, we might as well be unpopping bottles on the deck of the titanic right now, ya mean?

also terrifying: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/9661559/Coffee-threatened-by-climate-change.html

; (

We should start an Apocalypse: How Are You Preparing for Catastrophic Climate Change? thread. Share tips w/ fellow ilxors. Compare elevation maps.

figure out where gun ownership is concentrated the most and stay away from those areas

I was discussing global warming with my very religious but liberal father this weekend. He believes that God is sending storms as wake up calls to people to get them to take global warming seriously. He doesn't believe God will allow us to destroy the world, but will modify our behavior through negative consequences.

― Mordy, Saturday, November 10, 2012 10:56 PM (17 minutes ago)

god as a behavioral economist avant la lettre

there are those solar tower things that use a field of mirrors to concentrate sunlight and superheat water to drive turbines

sort of a rudimentary technology but iirc a giant field of 10,000 square miles of them in the sahara desert could provide all europe's energy needs

More 'climate change'-related utter drivel.

As others have stated, NO warming for the past 16 long years, despite increased atmospheric CO2. It's hilarious; evidence is straight in front of our eyes and some still will not see it. CO2 theory trashed and falsified, yet it's the 'emperors new clothes' for many who have invested their cash and reputations into 'climate change'.

The second-greatest scam of all-time.

what is #1?

scalectrix

oh humanity in some form will survive, i'm sure. it's only a few degrees and humans are pretty adaptable.

well, no... once we reach at certain temperature, environmental feedback loops kick in that cause more rapid warming.

imagine a habitable earth for humans as a ball on a small flat area atop a mountain. push it a few inches and it'll stay on top. push it a couple inches more, and it'll roll downhill with increasing speed regardless of whether you have stopped pushing on it or not. that's where we are now with global warming. somewhere between 2 and 6 degrees of warming will take us over the edge, and we don't even know where exactly. and whatever flat area the ball next comes to rest in may not support human life; it certainly will not be anything like where we're at now.

http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-of-climate-change/

Oceans' rising acidity a threat to shellfish — and humans

Slide after slide, the results were the same. The entire batch of 100 million larvae at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery had perished.

It took several years for the Oregon oyster breeder and a team of scientists to find the culprit: a radical change in ocean acidity.

The acid levels rose so high that the larvae could not form their protective shells, according to a study published this year. The free-swimming baby oysters would struggle for days, then fall exhausted to the floor of the tank.

"There's no debating it," said Barton, who manages Whiskey Creek, which supplies three-quarters of the oyster seed to independent shellfish farms from Washington to California. "We're changing the chemistry of the oceans."

Rising acidity doesn't just imperil the West Coast's $110-million oyster industry. It ultimately will threaten other marine animals, the seafood industry and even the health of humans who eat affected shellfish, scientists say.

The world's oceans have become 30% more acidic since the Industrial Revolution began more than two centuries ago. In that time, the seas have absorbed 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide that has built up in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.

And don't forget the possibility of methan clathrate explosions leading to even faster runaway climate change (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)

methanE

Compare elevation maps.
If your serious about this, the best spot in N. America is pretty clearly the Pacific northwest west of the Cascades. Western Oregon, Washington, and BC all still get as much or more rainfall in the models, are close enough to oceans to avoid Saharan heat summers, are on the wrong side of the continent for hurricanes, and have abundant wind and wave power potential. While the flora may change a bit due to the absence of freezes (think Mountain Pine Beetle wiping out old-growth forests in BC), it at least won't look like the Mojave.

and don't think our perimeter's unprotected

xp:
Also re feedbacks I'm inordinately fond of this flowchart from the first internet site devoted to methane clathrate catastrophes.

http://www.killerinourmidst.com/grafix/MC%20diagram%203.jpg
Can you find where we are on this map, Timmy?

what is euxinic?

Every time I see that, I wonder what the question marks mean between Methane Catastrophe and Stratospheric ozone destruction, and Decreased tropospheric cloud cover and Stratospheric ozone destruction.

Euxinic simply means that due to low disolved oxygen, there's free hydrogen sulfide in the water column. The oceans stratify locally or globally due to high temperature gradients, so there's no replenishment of bottom oxygen, and free hydrogen sulfide appears right up to the photic zone. This occurs presently in the Black Sea and off Namibia, and produces blooms of purple sulfur bacteria and green sulfur bacteria about 100 ft down. The green sulfur bacterias are the only organisms that produces isorenieratene, and this diagnostic biomarker has been found geologic anoxic events and mass extinctions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lYN_lXU9PA

feeling bad that I keep looking at this thread like "damn, this is a fucked-up science fiction novel you're all discussing", because there is no way I can fit the actual realness of it into my head

like it actually dawned on me as (probably) real, really for real real, for about one morning and that was too much for my brain and I had to mentally recategorise it and put my head back in the sand - but I'm still here reading it in this detached way which scares me if I think about it, so I don't

Any of you who haven't yet should at the very least consider writing what politicians you can and demanding them to take action. Also, write whatever university you go to/went to/work at about divesting from fossil fuels. I know it's easy to be discouraged by what we're up against but hell, we've gotta try something.

Sure, why not. Who do you think would be the best politicians to contact? I'll send a message to my National + State House rep + Senators. Anyone else?

Pretty sure that's why Gore went with sea level rise as the main danger in Inconvenient Truth - its can be readily visualized, and sounds a lot less like science fiction than some of the actual "worst case scenarios" that the climatologists and paleoclimatologists look at. Thing is the big ice sheets have a lot of thermal inertia. Current models have Greenland melting over 3,000-20,000 years in a 6° C Arctic warming, and 1,000-5,000 years in an 8° C warmer Arctic. That's a lot of time to build dikes and levees.

The tipping points like the permafrost methane and methane clathrates causing a runaway greenhouse (like that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) are barely mentioned by name in the mass media - the public generally just hears about vague "tipping points". If you read enough about these events (which occur with some regularity in the geological record), you're in for a lot of sleepless nights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1liqk9UQNAQ

BO. Also, the 1 year hold he put on the keystone pipeline last year thanks to Mckibben and friends' civil disobedience is about to end, so let him know that we can't afford that much more fossil fuel getting burned.

Sent. If anyone wants to see my copy of the letter for inspiration for their own (or just reuse) I'm happy to share it.

"and, you know, particulates in the atmosphere or whatever might work. i hope something does. but there is no will anywhere to reduce carbon emissions."

i brought this up on the politics thread in passing but is there any chance for some massive new deal type thing where you create jobs making windmills and installing solar panels on federal land/buildings? since everyone is screaming about jobs people would have more jobs and it would make the climate thing more real if the govt actually took some big bold step like that. guess it would never happen. seems like a no-brainer though. create jobs, create better energy sources, etc. i mean even if you powered ONLY government buildings/facilities with wind/solar you could create tons of jobs for years.

it wasn't framed as such, but the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, aka the "Stimulus", aka the harbinger for the apocalypse) was in large part a clean energy bill. there's a good article on that i posted a while back, can't remember where, but here it is again: http://grist.org/green-jobs/2011-02-16-the-most-important-energy-bill-in-american-history/

scott, I think a huge jobs program to implement alternative energy throughout the country would be lead to an economic boom, be a model for the world, and maybe save humanity. such an amazing idea.

xpost

but you're right, green jobs are a huge opportunity. whenever obama brings it up and can just sound like the usual political bullshit since he usually crams it inbetween sentences talking about how great clean coal is, how much he loves fracking, and how the thought of expanding domestic drilling even more than he already has makes him shoot jets of spooge to heights and distances that approach his personal records. but it really is going to be one of the most important source of jobs in the 21st century.

BO's administration still leased 272 million tons of coal mining rights from Federal lands on average from 2008-2011. About 10 times the annual carbon content shipped by the proposed Keystone XL (25.3 million tons/year).

A barrel of Athabasca coal sands oil is basically a barrel + 2-3 mmbtu of natural gas in terms of emissions (Ie, roughly 1.25-1.38 "ordinary" crude bbl emission equivalents). There's frontier (deep sea, etc) conventional oil that emits that much when one includes the emissions involved in discovery and development, so the idea that Alberta oil sands is particularly dirty always seemed a bit wooly.

Anyway, if anyone wants a sample letter, this one focuses on green jobs: http://tinyurl.com/be49asy

a few years ago there was something called the Apollo Alliance (since renamed the BlueGreen Alliance), that pushed for clean energy jobs on a massive scale. The Apollo reference, of course, being to the Apollo program, as a reminder that it's possible to do amazing things in a short amount of time if you invest enough energy and money.