Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

hey guys I know global warming & climate change is mega depressing but try reading this it'll make you feel better

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Banaka otm. Let the koalas burn.

wow, 乒乓 otm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/4/5/b454ac1f2f8bd9c458b46bcbaebb9bd5.png Scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing a black hole with the estimated mass of the entire Universe, observable or not, assuming Linde's chaotic inflationary model with an inflaton whose mass is 10−6 Planck masses.

^really puts things into perspective

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

In their scenario for = −1.5, the galaxies would first be separated from each other. About 60 million years before the end, gravity would be too weak to hold the Milky Way and other individual galaxies together. Approximately three months before the end, the solar system (or systems similar to our own at this time, as the fate of our own solar system 7.5 billion years in the future is questionable) would be gravitationally unbound. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and an instant before the end, atoms would be destroyed.[1]

http://i.imgur.com/mr0Kn.png

rip gr80

Nah, shield volcanos over hotpots have pretty mild eruptions. The earth drools basalt rather placidly compared to the explosive vomiting of melted crust from stratovolcanos at continental margins.

xp Big_Rip:

What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!

wow that is the best wikipedia article i have maybe ever seen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

so, putting together a couple of entries on this timeline:

the "arecibo message" was transmitted into space in 1974. if it's received and a reply is sent by the same method, by the time it arrives, the niagara falls will no longer exist, having eroded away to nothing

~stares into space for several minutes~

... space stares back.

in addition to the declining extent of the arctic sea ice, it's also getting thinner. there's a nice discussion and animation of this at http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2012/arctic-sea-ice-getting-thinner-younger, but they decided to make it a video that can't be easily shared and is gigantic (60MB). when i get home i think i'll make a simple gif out of it (less than 1MB, sharable almost anywhere).

finally got around to it:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/0f11c28322e21e504a84557d1b94850e/tumblr_merzd5aB6n1qdmmiqo1_500.gif

that is awesomely clear and terrifying

Wow ZS. Can we share this around?

of course! just make sure to include the link to the article: http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2012/arctic-sea-ice-getting-thinner-younger

xp flopson:

You might also enjoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/world/asia/record-heat-fuels-widespread-fires-in-australia.html

Four months of record-breaking temperatures stretching back to September 2012 have produced what the government says are “catastrophic” fire conditions along the eastern and southeastern coasts of the country, where the majority of Australians live.

Data analyzed on Wednesday by the government Bureau of Meteorology indicated that national heat records had again been set. The average temperature across the country on Tuesday was the highest since statistics began being kept in 1911, at 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit), exceeding a mark set only the day before. Meteorologists have had to add two new color bands to their forecast maps, extending their range up to 129° Fahrenheit.

“Those of us who spend our days trawling — and contributing to — the scientific literature on climate change are becoming increasingly gloomy about the future of human civilization,” Elizabeth Hanna, a researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra, told The Sydney Morning Herald. “We are well past the time of niceties, of avoiding the dire nature of what is unfolding, and politely trying not to scare the public.”

I was just down there, more or less, last week, on a farm near Ulladulla, where there were a lot of trees and other bits of the bush still charred from fires back in ... 2001, maybe? So weird that the time we spent in NSW was unseasonably cool, followed by a radical shift this severe. Very scary.

Meanwhile, here in Chicago it is in the low 50s. In January. Taken as a whole, with that report calling 2012 the warmest US on record, and I'm pretty scared shitless.

it's supposed to be 60 in NJ over the weekend. one day i'll have to teach my future children how the seasons used to be. "winter was cold ... all the time. and there was a season called spring that started cool and slowly got warmer..."

Honestly, I was thinking about that in the car an hour ago. "When I was younger, we had trees, and grass was green, and you could drink the water, and the world was not always on fire ..."

The last time that there was a month with a below average global temperature was February 1985, when I was 1 1/2 years old.

320 days in Chicago with less than an inch of snow. Record.

Water level of Lake Michigan supposedly way down. Obviously the Mississippi is a wreck right now for the same reason.

What happens after 100 years and +5 degrees celsius? Does it stop, or does it keep just getting hotter and hotter until in 700 years we're baked off the planet?

It was 108 degrees in Sydney yesterday!

Apparently.

so hot australia had to add two new colors to its forecast map

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/australia-wildfires

they are visible from space

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/01/01fotos/Australia-fires-600.jpg/image_large

Doing presentation training at work, going to talk about CC to my materialist coworkers. My original topic was going to be what owning a dog can teach humans.

oh man, good luck!

i wonder what dogs could teach us about climate change?

don't shit in yr own bed i guess

or find someone to walk around behind you with a plastic bag so you never have to deal with that shit

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.html

i read that the other day (yesterday?) when you posted it, and although it would be great news if population would "naturally" stabilize (rather than being forced down by widespread famine/diseases) sooner rather than later, and even decline a little, the article does nothing to convince me that it will. plus, i find it really hard to take paragraphs like this seriously:

That might sound like an outrageous claim, but it comes down to simple math. According to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the initial publication, some details have changed—Europe’s population is falling faster than was previously anticipated, while Africa’s birthrate is declining more slowly—but the overall outlook is the same.) Extend the trend line, and within a few dozen generations you’re talking about a global population small enough to fit in a nursing home.

They hold up Germany as the OMG what if everyone's birth rate falls this low? example. OK, worst-case-scenarios are how journalism works* - but there's no argument offered as to why Germany should provide the model.

It is interesting that they don't mention the situation in the UK, which is that fertility rates have been rising year-on-year since 2001 and are now nearing 2. That increase in fertility is mainly accounted for by white britishers, not immigrant populations.

The author also disregards the fact that death rates are still falling. Annual births still exceed deaths in the UK, so the population would be increasing even without immigration.

*Personally think this is a p. cool scenario

Predicting future birth rates is a bit of a mug's game

xp Bnad:

Given the ultimate atmospheric carbon load the Earth system approaches a new equilibrium between solar radiation and the amount reradiated. Assuming radiative forcing stabilizes at 2100 levels, a further 0.5 °C mean temperature increase is expected by 2200 as the deep oceans warm up to equilibrium. Here's a longer term chart of climate models from IPCC 2007:

http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/figure-ts-32-l.png

But there's a lot of carbon in natural reservoirs, like drying/burning equatorial rainforests, melting/decaying permafrost (worth maybe 1 °C) and destabilizing seabed methane clathrates (I've seen no good estimates here, because but the clathrates vary so widely in depth/vulnerability, but the total amount (2,000 ~ 10,000 Gt) is multiples larger than current atmospheric carbon). These tipping point effects are not modeled in the current or planned IPCC scenarios, likely due to high uncertainty in the amounts and pace of those natural releases.

During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, 2500-6800 Gt of carbon were released over a few thousand years, resulting in a 6 °C rise that gradually subsided over the ensuing 200,000 years. The large PETM δ13C excursion seen in seabed cores suggests that runaway greenhouse emissions of biogenic methane clathrates was responsible. Using this as a model, we won't become Venus (not in this billion years), as the vast majority of terrestrial carbon is locked way in crustal carbonite rock, but we're making decisions this generation that will effect the next thousand generations.

^ ...were responsible...affect the next 1000 generations... Want a post editor here...

At this rate, 2200 seems an awful long way away. I'm pretty worried about 2013 or 2014.

Gave my presentation, muffed a point about economy and adaptation costs I wanted to make to the debt hawks in the crowd, and the one question I got was, "So... you're a member of that... EPA, huh?"

haha, i've been there

in that situation, i mean

Snowed in the middle east. Israel, Saudi Arabia ...

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full

Indeed, if humanity is very unlucky with the climate, there may be reductions in yields of major crops [45], although near-term this may be unlikely to affect harvests globally [46].

Feels like this is inevitable, actually, but I can't back that feeling up right now.

even without climate change, future crop yields are uncertain anyway. annual growth in crop yields after the agricultural green revolution has been declining for years, and it's fully stagnated or worse in many areas (from the abstract of a Nature article published a few weeks ago: "Although yields continue to increase in many areas, we find that across 24–39% of maize-, rice-, wheat- and soybean-growing areas, yields either never improve, stagnate or collapse." maintaining continued growth (to meet population growth) is already turning into a battle between monsanto and their industrial budz vs a declining stock of land resources, both in terms of quantity and quality. we deplete our topsoil at a rate that is 10 to 40 times faster than it's ability to regenerate itself (100-400 years per cm). and about 40% of the soil that we do use is classified as either degraded or seriously degraded.

all of that's before you consider climate change.

I hadn't seen this before layed out so plainly before, but Gwynne Dyer corresponds with the leading lights of the field, so I don't doubt it:

The rule of thumb is that we lose ten per cent of global food production for every rise in average global temperature of one degree C.

So, if we're on a path to 9 billion and a 3 °C, we just need to collectively decide which third of our descendands will starve.

NYT Dismantles its Environment Desk

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.