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edit: nm, I saw that conference where they've shown Methane releasing from the submerged Siberian plane. We're fucked.
Here is a good video about the arctic methane emergency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9ed5E54s4 Some summary points: - Total amount of methane in the current atmosphere: ~5 gigatons - Amount of carbon preserved as methane in the arctic shelf: estimated at 100s-1000s of gigatons - Only 1% release would double the atmospheric burden of methane - Not much effort is needed to destabilize this 1% - The volume current…
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In layman's terms, how much are we screwed without hope of a solution, and what is the rough timeframe before the evening news starts looking like "The Day After Tomorrow?"
I'm wondering the same thing. Should I start blowing through my 401k money now or what?
I know it's stupid and crazy, but would carpet bombing the arctic work to burn up the methane trapped below the permafrost before it leaks out into the atmosphere and causes worse problems? Or maybe we should send out expedition crews to find and preemptively explode these methane bubbles. Perhaps the way things are going they will become too plentiful to really do anything realistic about it.
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There is some hope. We could geoengineer a giant shade structure to reflect sunlight away from earth. It would cost $trillions (twelve zeros) but it could be done with current technology. And it would cool the Earth immediately. Unfortunately it would do nothing to fix ocean acidification, which threatens to starve and/or suffocate us all.
That "solution" fucking sucks. We kinda rely on the sun to grow plants and power life, you know?
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I suspect that the interests driving denial are planning to ride the crash. There are probably developments in favorable locations. Land. Security. Infrastructure. Resources.
Does somebody have climatology models reliable enough to determine a favorable location? AFAIK, anything can go wrong anywhere.
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Yeah, exponentials are tricky. By the time danger is clear, it's too late to do anything about it. But hey, at least this will probably be self-limiting. Disruption will arguably reduce population and industrialization, and so CO2 emissions will drop.
And then good luck rebuilding civilization now that every easily accessible resource has been mined/harvested out.
• Digitize all human knowledge and as much art/literature as you can gather (books, music, movies, shows, games, even porn and random YouTube videos and discussions on online forums :) Most of that work has already been done.
• Store it on the most resilient (and simple/repairable) storage media you can,
• Bundle it with devices that can read that data,
• Along with instructions for building/reinventing such devices, and instructions on how to interpret that data (i.e. JPEG and other file formats :)
• Also include a guide for translating the instructions. Assume that a future reader may not understand any of our current languages, or even be human at all.
• Put it all in a silo as physically strong as you can build.
• Make copies of the silo and bury one on each continent and in each ocean. Maybe even on the Moon?
• Distribute markers and maps to each silo (and instructions for opening them) all over the world.
• Let fate take its course.
All of this could be done by a few individuals and most of it won't even require a lot of money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, exponentials are tricky. By the time danger is clear, it's too late to do anything about it. But hey, at least this will probably be self-limiting. Disruption will arguably reduce population and industrialization, and so CO2 emissions will drop.
And then good luck rebuilding civilization now that every easily accessible resource has been mined/harvested out.