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Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#241

Post by blondie9x »

We all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem.

What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html

We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar energy is starting to become incredibly efficient but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves.

What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#242

Post by maratd »

ageofwant wrote: post #178
maratd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is very human-centric point of view. How many species will be lost forever as a direct cause of this event ? Actually, it's your view that's human-centric. Species? Diversity? These are human concepts and mores. > There is no time for evolution to work over the 200 years this last change happened. Evolution doesn't "work". It's merely the process of natural and sexual selection. The flora and fauna are constan…

No, its a systems viewpoint. And it can only be held by an organism that can appreciate the system. All other organisms breed util the systems natural capacity is exhausted and continually competes against one another. You know exactly what I mean by "work". The current 6'th mass extinction (Holocene) is currently ongoing. The species responsible for this has no natural enemies against which we compete and will there…

> The species responsible for this has no natural enemies against which we compete and will therefore continue unabated until all resources have been consumed and the system collapses.

This isn't remotely true. There are tons of bacteria and viruses which are parasitic towards us. We compete against them.

Nevermind the fact that the greatest competition always comes from your own species. The greatest check on human expansion and prosperity is humanity. We kill, maim, and restrict each other on grand scales.

There is also no historical evidence that a single species has ever been responsible for a mass extinction, so I find it odd that you're assuming we'll be the first when there is a historical record that spans billions of years. That's just arrogance.

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#243

Post by G43nm45ji »

ObeyTheGuts wrote: post #223
vixen99 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least we are unlikely to starve: satellite imaging shows very significant greening of the planet in many areas previously barren. How so? As the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs puts it, “The benefits of carbon dioxide supplementation on plant growth and production within the greenhouse environment have been well understood for many years. For the majority of greenhouse crops, net photo…

But this means more carbs in plant and less proteins, the diluted nutrients is said to be cause of bees dieng off, as they eat pollen for their protein needs and pollen has less protein, because plants dillute it with all that extra carbohydrate productions caused by more co2 in atmosphere

Do you have a source or any information you can point me to? Thanks,

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#244

Post by kaybe »

lqdc13 wrote: post #196
sd8f9iu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The big fear with climate change is that it's irreversible. That is not the case with the other problems you mention. 2. Climate change is predicted to cause food supply problems for hundreds of millions of people, trillions of dollars of economic damage, and rising sea levels that flood coastal cities. I don't see how the other problems you mention are more dire. 3. The problems you mention – homelessness, drug a…

1. It is reversible over time if people concentrated on removing CO2 from the air. 2. This is not yet known. What if Russia opens borders and lets people in as long as they stay in Siberia? What if food supply shortage helps innovate instead or changes priorities? 3. Snobby in a way for criticizing countries that are going through their versions of industrial revolution when the West went through it already. 4. Not m…

re (1.) It might not be that easy. Sure, the planet would cool down again, but

- the 1000 year ocean cycle takes time, (which is now transporting heat and carbon into the lower ocean layers)

- building up the ice sheets again takes way longer, and ice sheets are important to the albedo, thus also have an influence on climate,

- there are some points where something big might change, such as ocean current patterns changing permanently(due to changes in heat and salinity distribution), permafrost thawing and releasing huge volumes of methane, ..

It's a massive problem to undo. Right now it'd be still relatively easy, but it might not stay that way.

(We'll have to learn how to control the climate longterm anyway since another ice age would be desastrous, but it's too soon. We're still to unknowledgerable and weak.)

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#245

Post by nl »

briandear wrote: post #188
wallace_f wrote: post #175

Sometimes I feel I am the only one sceptical of the politics and alarmism surrounding climate change. I am Not saying I'm skeptical that it is real (or to be more appropriately scientific, that the evidence suggests the observed increase in CO2 and temperature most likely is caused by emissions), but I'm saying the politics are more complex than that. I can think of a number of other issues that pose similar if not m…

My problem is that the climate change activism crowd have admitted that the benefit of climate change regulation is income redistribution and effectively the destruction of capitalism. The climate change movement started gaining stream after the Soviet Union collapsed. I am very skeptical of climate activists with their almost identical similarity to the pro-Soviet propagandists from the 1980s. "But one must say clea…

That quote makes a lot of sense in context. He is discussing the economics of climate change policy, and talking specifically about the proposals at that time to allow developing countries higher emission targets because they were disadvantaged by not already having industrialized. He is pointing out that policy can be viewed as wealth redistribution, and that all the arguments about the response to climate change are economic, not environmental.

Read the full interview where he says it here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/18/ipcc-official-“climat...

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#246

Post by Shivetya »

Higher CO2 levels will increase crop yields for many types of foods and in general flip back as the world greens to soak it up.

While some will correctly identify deforestation, animal farming, and fossil fuel usage, most over look the costs in making concrete and the building boom as more of the world gets richer won't help that come down.

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#247

Post by mikeash »

zaro wrote: post #228
mikeash wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it odd to see people criticizing each other because their comments are too human-centric. I happen to be human, and I believe the same is true of most of the commenters here. I don't really care very much about what happens to the Earth as a whole, but the survival and prosperity of humanity matters a great deal to me.

I find it odd, that you don't care what happens to the Earth as a whole, given that is the only place you can live as a human :) And the thing is that the prosperity of the human species in the last century has been made largely at the expense of the Earth as whole.

I care about the Earth as far as it affects humanity. If white rhinos go extinct, that's sad, and the loss of biodiversity is harmful, but it's a fairly small thing. If, say, wheat were to go extinct, that would be a huge disaster.

The fact that our recent prosperity has come at the expense of the Earth is only bad in so far as that harm to the Earth is harmful to humans too. The two are linked, but not identical. The only way to eliminate human-induced harm to the Earth would be to eliminate humans, so the goal needs to be mitigation of harm and where possible moving harm to the Earth into areas that affect humans less.

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#248

Post by gshubert17 »

ajnin wrote: post #93
tgb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful. I'd love to have seen it in an equal-area projection, though. The high concentrations are disproportionately in the high latitudes where area is stretched, so I think the yearly variation would look a little less ominous that way. Anyway, I hope one day we can get a new Sim Earth with this style of simulation and presentation.

Here's another visualization by Oregon State University, similar to the video but with a navigable equal-area map : http://co2.digitalcartography.org/

I recall seeing a long-term (from roughly 18,000 BCE to 3000 CE) visualization of ice-cover, ground cover, and sea level, with numbers on the side showing CO2, human population, and population below current sea level. I recall CO2 less than 200 PPM during the last glaciation, and I think this projection showed a peak around 560 PPM, before gradually declining. Sea levels kept going up though, given the assumptions in this scenario.

But I can't find it again. Anyone know about this?

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#249

Post by Oletros »

briandear wrote: post #191
sd8f9iu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The big fear with climate change is that it's irreversible. That is not the case with the other problems you mention. 2. Climate change is predicted to cause food supply problems for hundreds of millions of people, trillions of dollars of economic damage, and rising sea levels that flood coastal cities. I don't see how the other problems you mention are more dire. 3. The problems you mention – homelessness, drug a…

I've been hearing about the sky falling because of climate change most of my life. Yet in the 1970s it was global cooling. The easiest way to convince someone of a particular 'danger' is to promise world-ending catastrophe. The science was 'settled' on Eugenics during the early 20th century as well and we saw how that turned out. There's no mention of any positive effects of global warming. The climate is certainly c…

> Yet in the 1970s it was global cooling

No, scientists never predicted global cooling

> There's no mention of any positive effects of global warming

Perhaps because there is none that outweighs the negative effects?

Re: Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years

#250

Post by Oletros »

tr1ck5t3r wrote: post #225

For context, CO2 has been in the thousands parts per million in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxid... Sure the planet is warming up as the sun slowly goes super nova in millions of years time, but the biggest short term risk we face in the next 30 years which could last 500 years is the Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) A GSM is where sunspots drop off and the planet experiences extreme we…

> but the biggest short term risk we face in the next 30 years which could last 500 years is the Grand Solar Minimum (GSM)

Citation needed

> we really dont know how the CO2 released by man from oil and cutting down trees is going to do

No, we know perfectly well

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