It seems the only way to combat the thawing permafrost problem is to deploy world-scale carbon capturing schemes of some sort. Here's to hoping that we can develop something like that in time.
Suddenly: Snowpiercer.
Was that peer-reviewed?
Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
191–200 of 305 posts
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because there is no practical plan to reduce them to zero. There's much hand-wringing about future technologies, but the reality of it is that it will require drastic reduction in consumption.
Very unlikely that is the case. You are assuming that clean technologies will produce only economic cost not a net economic benefit. But that's not how technology works generally
Great, what is the national road-map for our transition to these net-beneficial clean technologies? If they are net-beneficial, why haven't we transitioned to them yet? What factors blocking this transition will be removed in the years to come, and how exactly are we going to remove them? What decade we going to hit net zero carbon?
It's like a startup saying: "Well, sure, we are losing money hand over fist, and our per-unit economics don't make sense, but you're assuming that we won't discover... Something... that will make us profitable."
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#193It is not just a bomb that can blow the arctic. It can destroy all human civilization. And at this point, we may have lost any ability to do anything. Edit: Doom scale... 1 Inconvenient storms. 2 More frequent natural disasters. 3 Destroying coastal cities. 4 Causing hunger, wars and mass migrations. 5 Decimating human population. 6 Destroying human civilization. 7 Destroying all humans on earth. 8 Destroying all lif…
The sad thing is that scientists have understood the risks of global warming for decades, and yet our civilization (maybe I'm just speaking for the US here) seems impotent to effectively coordinate a response to this slow-motion threat. It could be our own Great Filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
US and EU are doing a lot about reducing their output of CO2, but unfortunately that’s completely dwarfed by new output elsewhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
Without global actors taking full responsibility, we are basically screwed.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#194It is not just a bomb that can blow the arctic. It can destroy all human civilization. And at this point, we may have lost any ability to do anything. Edit: Doom scale... 1 Inconvenient storms. 2 More frequent natural disasters. 3 Destroying coastal cities. 4 Causing hunger, wars and mass migrations. 5 Decimating human population. 6 Destroying human civilization. 7 Destroying all humans on earth. 8 Destroying all lif…
No no, we've still got this. We can do it.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.
It's no more difficult than Tolkien. Prose from that era was practically poetry. Of course, I grew up reading a lot of books and short stories from that era, so maybe it's easier for my old brain, like riding a bicycle.
Like reading a bicycle.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
agree, but in the long long run it will lean towards hotter as the sun changes phases. eventually earth will be a scorched rock without anyone's help. you have to consider, the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and we only have 1 billion left, but life will be wiped out much 'sooner' then that.
Why does the Earth have one billion years left?
In about a billion years the sun will exhaust enough nuclear fuel to cool and expand, boiling the oceans, blowing off our atmosphere, and turning Earth back into a sterile rock.
It's predicted by astronomers and physicists who study stellar evolution.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is definitely no shortage of doomsday climate models. CREDIBLE models is a different story. Look back at ones from 20+ years ago to see what they predicted would be happening by now. It's pretty funny actually.
The models from 20 years ago overshot by several confidence intervals because they underestimated mixing the deep ocean. "The barrel is bigger than we expected" doesn't make the rising water in the barrel any less concerning, but it's not the triumph of foresight that you seem to imply.
Grandparent didn't imply it was a triumph of foresight, but rather a failure of foresight.
I think that's what he's saying - a general point that people's understanding of climate (and thus predictions about it) are poorer than commonly believed.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the Earth has been a lot warmer and colder in the past. We've had massive volcanoes going off for thousands of years, we've had iceball earth, we've had crocodiles and palm trees in the arctic. The Earth's systems always balance out over the long run. We don't stay trapped in ice ages or hot phases.
The difference with the past is that the sun is slowly getting hotter. Increasing the incoming solar power by a mere 10% would be enough to tip the climate into a runaway process that will boil the oceans and scour the surface. Our Earth only has a billion more years to go https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216142310.h...
In a billion years we will find out how to countermeasure this. Is really a long time.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the abstract what you wrote is fine, but my impression is that "enjoy what we have here and now" means "keep polluting" to most people. I think people can maintain or even improve their own happiness while decreasing their pollution. At least this could make humanity last longer. I'm a transportation cyclist. I mostly ride to save money and improve my physical fitness. The environmental benefits seem to depend on…
I always thought about cycling to work, but that would mean more than doubling the amount of time commuting and thus complicating the family organization (basically my wife, who is also having a full-time job, would need to take care of everything, while I am polluting less). So far I haven't found a definite solution to how, in the modern world, work at least 8-10 hours per day, possibly far from home, while having…
Try cycling once and see how you like it. It's a small investment, and you really don't know how it will go until you try it. It's not uncommon either to commute by bike one day a week if you like it but can't do it every day. I think most people are far too pessimistic about how possible cycling is.
Though I do agree that cycling is practically impossible for many people, consider this: Just like most people consider their driving commute when choosing where to live, a cyclist needs to consider their cycling commute when choosing where to live. If you optimize for driving, don't expect cycling to be easy. The same applies for jobs: many people won't take a job if they expect the traffic to be a pain. I won't take any jobs that make cycling impossible or even hard. Exact same logic.
Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that civilization is a comparatively new development, and nobody really knows how that's going to fare in the face of all this. The human cost is likely to be staggering.
If nobody knows than why do you assume the cost _likely_ staggering?
We're uncertain about the rarity of global collapse due to climate change. The more uncertain we are about our uncertainty of the rarity of a global catastrophe, the more rational it is for us to assume we are likely presently under-estimating its rarity, rather than over-estimating it, because examples of global catastrophe are pretty hard to come by. If nobody knows if it's gonna happen, but the consequence of catastrophe is so bad that it disrupts life as we know it, that means that our uncertainty about our uncertainty of its probability should increase our willingness to defend against its potential ~ -inf payoff, rather than decrease our willingness to.
The thing is, not only is there reasonable evidence that climate change is occurring - which reduces the hesitation to actually spend money protecting against it - but also that it's a problem that concerns pretty much every country.