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Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

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Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#501

Post by imgabe »

adrianN wrote: post #461
imgabe wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, maybe not. If you want to split hairs then, how many billion people do you think it's acceptable to kill or cause to suffer so we can have iPhones? People are very bad at estimating the probability of catastrophic events. We base our estimates on things that have happened in the past, but that doesn't help predict things that have never happened before. Hundreds of millions of years of pent up carbon have neve…

That's a false dichotomy. There is no reason to believe that we can't have modern technology without catastrophic climate change. If for example we switched completely to nuclear energy and electric cars we would greatly reduce our carbon footprint to the point where the rest might be offset by planting trees and turning them into charcoal.

IF we did those things, sure. However there is significant pressure from various interests to stop us from doing those things on the basis that climate change won't really be a problem or that we'll fix it somehow if it is.

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#502

Post by flukus »

gambiting wrote: post #496
nol13 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really is depressing seeing the stuff about the great barrier reef etc. Hard to hopeful that we can change course when every indication is that we as a species are not capable of cooperating on such a level. And even if everyone on earth agreed, who's going to enforce such policies? Would probably require a literal New World Order. Have fun getting the conspiritards (who would have been proven right) to go along…

What's more sad is that even if the nations of the world agreed to do something, with the rise of nationalism globally we would see push against "other countries telling us what to do!" like we saw in the UK. It doesn't matter that EU fishing quotas were introduced to save valuable fishing grounds - no, it's presented here as "big bad EU wanting to take jobs from poor British fishermen".

We had that moment in the 90s, then came Bush and the world's done jack all since.

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#503

Post by torrent-of-ions »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #442
torrent-of-ions wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soil depletion: http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/07/soil-depletion-human-sec... Groundwater depletion: https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html Antibiotic resistance: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231044-000-antibiot... Shall I go on?

Yes, please! Because the only response I can think of to the list you've posted is "so what?" Humanity faced a lot of problems in the past. Let me remind you just a few: * multiple plagues decimating European population * wheat rust (and unpredictable famines ensuing) * guano depletion However, we engineered our way out of them. I can't see why the problems you've listed are any different.

Yes, we engineered our way out of them providing better conditions for future generations. We are not engineering our way out of the problems I listed, but rather making them worse and worse and creating worse conditions for future generations.

Plagues could still happen again. We know more about how they occur and how to contain them, but we don't have any magic bullet against all future plagues that will occur.

Rust is still a problem. I'm not sure why you think it isn't. We have more resistant lines and fungicides but the rust is adapting rapidly.

The difference is, apart from maybe the guano depletion, none of the problems you list of the past were due to human actively making things worse. All of the problems I listed are due to action right now that will cause major problems in the future.

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#504

Post by youdontknowtho »

demonshalo wrote: post #257
youdontknowtho wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement that the green movement would be embraced by everyone if they understood tradeoffs and economics doesn't take into account the opposition from entrenched interests and capital. Your argument makes it sound like most people actually have an option to participate in progress or not (they don't realistically) or that the people making the decisions on tradeoffs are doing so in a rational way that benefits…

> Your statement that the green movement would be embraced by everyone if they understood tradeoffs and economics doesn't take into account the opposition from entrenched interests and capital. It would be if the gains were on the level that would justify the adoption of whatever was/is proposed. Give me any tech, green or not, with 10x improvement on what currently exist and I can bet you anything that no amount of…

I agree with you about people not wanting to live in the world that they are signing other people up for.

Despite the fact that I'm about as liberal as a person can get, my problem with the fossil fuel argument is that places like New York state ban fracking but buy natural gas from Texas and Louisiana. So it's OK for us to screw up our environment, but it's not OK in their back yard. Louisiana is so captured by the energy companies that its one of, if not the most, polluted states in the country. New Yorkers get to make money off of energy, use the energy, and complain about how its produced? Fuck that in the ear.

The thing that bothers me the most, though, is the way that we (meaning the democratically elected government) can't use the levers of power to force the massive economic engines that are the energy companies to finance the shift to other technologies. Like a sovereign wealth fund, or something like that. The way it works now, the people fund research and give tax breaks to companies in lots of sectors that are then allowed to privatize the profits that get generated from that investment. Why can't we get part of the profits? Instead of fighting over taxes, it should be viewed as actual ownership and return on investment.

I know that the idea would make a lot of libertarians throw up in their mouth, but I don't think that you can really ever keep government out of markets. It makes the markets. If it operated from an ownership perspective then it can use that ownership to make the public's concerns a real fiduciary issue. It's already picking and choosing winners and losers. It always has. The question, at least as it seems to me, is on whose behalf is the government going to intervene? It's going to intervene. Should that be only to benefit the wealthiest, or is there a way that we can force the markets to honor democratic will without completely screwing it up. I don't know, but I can say this. I don't believe in business anymore as a means to solve any problem. Over the course of my life I have only seen business prove time and time again that short sighted, short term, growth is more important than any other factor.

Even with the way that government has colluded with business to help create the situation we are in, at least government has even notionally democratic institutions while business are inherently un-democratic. I'm not a shareholder of Exon by birth, although I am an American.

I don't know. I'm not optimistic. I do agree with you though about the faux hippie thing. That kind of woo woo BS ends the conversation just as fast as saying "Jesus will fix it".

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#505

Post by youdontknowtho »

program_whiz wrote: post #365
youdontknowtho wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream reality. I'll bite. What's the dream reality?

Seems like there's a sub-thread going on in this discussion relating to zen/buddhism/enlightenment. Dream reality or "Maya" is the reality of concepts and ego. "Reality" is the real tangible experience of consciousness. Everything else is layered on top of that as projection or thought. However, I can tell you having had some experience in this area that using these doctrines to create a "good and evil" but just usin…

Right. OK.

So, while some aspects of what we know from neuroscience and modern medicine map pretty closely to some eastern practices, those practices are embedded in superstitious religions that are no different from their counterparts in other regions.

The real goal is to procreate. There is no soul or divinity or whatever. While we can say that yes to a degree the world as experienced by my brain is like the concept of Maya and the synthesis of my inputs into consciousness are my subjective reality, that's really it. You can't get from there to "the real goal is to see the perfection of things".

The practices of meditation, visualization, etc do have benefits but they don't have to be rooted in the mysticism that spawned them. In fact, that's one of the things I like about zen. it rejects those notions because of the way that people assign baggage to them and start to worship the baggage instead of doing "the thing".

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#507

Post by gnode »

jacquesm wrote: post #290
gnode wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it isn't happening. Solar PV capacity is growing rapidly. Vehicles are increasingly powered by electric batteries. These things were all prohibitively expensive for most people in Western countries, but their declining cost has made them more affordable and more used.

Vehicles are increasingly powered by coal plants. Electric batteries don't power anything, they're best compared to empty buckets.

By powered, I don't mean to say the battery is the source of the energy it stores.

In analysing the effects of increased usage of electric transport, what's important is where new electricity generating capacity will come from. In the US that's primarily natural gas and solar. Coal generation has actually been decreasing.

Of course, that's not to say that if everyone suddenly started driving electric cars that all the new supply would be green energy.

However, even coal power stations taking into account powerline losses are more efficient than a typical car's engine, and in Western countries usually cleaner as far as particulate and nitrous oxide pollutants are concerned.

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#508

Post by nonbel »

drjesusphd wrote: post #493
nonbel wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you find a "serious climate scientist" who is claiming this "oceans boiling away" scenario is plausible? Alternatively, can you put some basic numbers on that? What will the surface temp need to be to initiate the boiling away? It looks like currently the TSI at Earth varies between 1315 and 1405 w/m^2 (a range of 90 w/m^2), which apparently has less effect on the temperature than the tilt of the earth. http://la…

Right. But it is a possible mechanism that has nothing to do with the current thickness of the atmosphere or distance to the sun. Once upon a time, Venus wasn't so bad either. Is James Hanson not "serious"? I agree that the consensus view seems to be that this is still an unlikely scenario. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runaw... As far as numbers go, I'm not a climate scientist, but I have do…

If I understood correctly, for that model they varied the "surface temperature" of a 1-dimensional object under constant illumination by hard-coding it, rather than simulating an increase in insolation or pressure to cause warming:

"When surface temperature is below the critical point temperature (647K), the surface pressure is set as the saturation vapour pressure for that surface temperature, and the tropospheric temperature– pressure structure is taken directly from the saturation vapour pressure curve. Where the surface temperature exceeds the critical point temperature, we prescribe surface pressure as 2.6×107 Pa, corresponding to Earth’s surface water reservoir." http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n8/full/ngeo1892.html

So first, they do increase the thickness of the atmosphere, and the increased surface temperature would come from a possible future sun (not adding CO2) I guess. Second, I wouldn't put much stock in such simplified models.

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#509

Post by FooBarWidget »

harwoodleon wrote: post #305
FooBarWidget wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? As an EU company, if I need to do business in the US then I can't say "let's schedule a meeting in a year while I go on a boat cruise". Virtual meetings only work to an extent -- they lack a human interaction touch. I suppose I can take a train if I go on holiday somewhere in the EU, but insane prices for international trains as well as other shenanigans are not making it an attractive choice.

I told you, you are symptomatic of the short-termist attitude that persists - we must carry on whatever the cost. The alternative is that you make do, because this is a serious situation, far more serious than a business deal. Ironically, your future income and the income and quality of your children's lives will be directly affected by your actions today. But, people just put it away in their minds, file it under "w…

That's easy for you to say but if I don't make money today then there may be no tomorrow to worry about.

My point is that this can't just be a thing that an individual decides. We need country-level or international-level cooperation. Prisoner's dilemma, as others have pointed out.

Re: Atmospheric CO2 levels accelerate upwards

#510

Post by DanWaterworth »

taejo wrote: post #197
pveierland wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that if you create a new forest, the amount of carbon needed to create it is taken from the atmosphere. Even if trees in the forest die and decompose, the forest will on average consist of carbon which previously was part of the atmosphere, in effect removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Yes. Planting a forest is a one-off, though. The only way to capture more carbon with the same land is to cut down all the trees, bury them deep enough so that they don't decompose, and start again.

There's also biochar
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