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Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

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Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#51

Post by specialist »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #40
castis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

I have heard this line several times before, and it is the environmental equivalent of "What if there is no God, and we are being good to each other for nothing." It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions a…

There is no tradeoff.

Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.

Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#52

Post by logfromblammo »

pjc50 wrote: post #41
EGreg wrote: post #25

Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation? This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide). I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmospher…

> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation? There's no money in it? Whereas there's plenty of money in deforestation. Tragic, but that is the world we live in.

Trees are for chumps. People should be planting grasses, and bamboo in particular.

The larger bamboo species grow faster than any tree, and can be exploited by the human economy on a shorter timescale, thus making people more likely to plant bamboo forests on their own initiative.

Grow bamboo. Cut it down. Use it for building and consumer products, such that its carbon content does not quickly return to the atmosphere as CO2 (and hopefully never as methane).

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#53

Post by smokeyj »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #44
jerf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much better world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process. Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.

I recommend you read "Money: The Unauthorized Biography [0]" You'll never look at money the same way again. Money is not a commodity even though we treat it as such. It certainly is not a finite resource. Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble.…

Actually.. Original money was just a highly marketable commodity. Salt, spices, gold, cigarettes in prison. I highly suggest a better biography of currency. Maybe something authored by one of those pesky Austrians.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#54

Post by crush-n-spread »

logfromblammo wrote: post #48
kdoherty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phenomenon that is being described where melting ice causes the release of CO2 into the atmosphere seems to have been known to climate scientists, though I don't know whether it has been included in climate change models. There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268... ) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the…

The trouser-soiling moment is when the methane clathrate ices start melting. They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly…

We need that global effort to happen yesterday. It's going to be much easier to get the carbon out of the atmosphere by leveraging the already-existing carbon cycle through accelerated silicate weathering than it will be to artificially reduce atmospheric temperatures once huge amounts of methane have been released from sea ice.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#55

Post by glitcher »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #15
taberiand wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

I came to that realization after taking an environmental education class where they " left out the feedback loops". I disagree with your sentiment that they had to leave things like this out of the model. If it was left out it was probably not well understood. Its pretty easy to see that any form of mitigation is irrelevant until it becomes a real problem because getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scient…

> getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society

Sadly true on so many levels.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#56

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo »

hood_syntax wrote: post #8
taberiand wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.

We need to invent fusion like yesterday and use that to power efforts to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#57

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo »

logfromblammo wrote: post #48
kdoherty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phenomenon that is being described where melting ice causes the release of CO2 into the atmosphere seems to have been known to climate scientists, though I don't know whether it has been included in climate change models. There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268... ) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the…

The trouser-soiling moment is when the methane clathrate ices start melting. They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly…

Doesn't methane break down in the atmosphere fairly rapidly? From what I'm reading, methane lasts about 12 years while CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for potentially thousands.

Unless we choke to death on methane isn't this less of an issue than CO2 buildup?

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#58

Post by chrononaut »

dvdhnt wrote: post #7

I don't think this is specific to Alaska - there's something similar going on in Siberia and other places where melting permafrost has the potential to do serious damage. There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us. - http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes-new-... - https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben-mezri...

For those looking around these sources wondering how woolly mammoth populations can save us, from The Verge article:

So these Russian scientists, the Zimovs, roped up a huge section of the permafrost starting in the ‘80s and are repopulating it with these large animals: reindeer, horses, bison. They’ve been able to lower the temperature of the permafrost by as much as 15 degrees [Fahrenheit] by reintroducing large herbivores. The mammoth project is all about this. If we can introduce a mammoth herd to the tundra, we can maybe save the environment for another 100 years, because they’ll help put into place these very natural processes to keep the environment colder.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#59

Post by QAPereo »

taberiand wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

I've been saying this in and offline for years... then I realized that it just doesn't matter... we're cooked. Things will be out of control before people eve understand what really happened, as in Egypt, Tunisia, etc.
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