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Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

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Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#211

Post by ekianjo »

scandox wrote: post #181
ekianjo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> xenophobe More than the people of his time?

Yes extremely more. And I like his stories.

Someone born in 1890 like Lovecraft would have been educated in the early 1900s where it was all about the White Race superiority to all other ones (check school books of the time) on top of hundreds of years of such thinking, so my guess is that you'd find people thinking like Lovecraft pretty much everywhere in his time. And regarding antisemitism, it's not like Lovecraft was an exception, antisemitism was rampant in early 20th century. So while Lovecraft was vocal about it in his letters, I doubt his peers and folks of his time would have very, very different.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#212

Post by clw8 »

labster wrote: post #165
Varcht wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dinosaurs are now birds? Do Velociraptors climb trees?

You got it backwards, birds are now dinosaurs. The world just got that much cooler. If you're not convinced, look through YouTube for videos of my favorite dinosaur, the raven.

Care to elucidate on the choice of ravens? I would go with cassowaries and emus as examples of "oh yeah they totally are dinosaurs"...

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#213

Post by fancyfacebook »

cgh wrote: post #91
leggomylibro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness ! http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx Spoilers: "...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its…

> crushing the frantic penguins There are no penguins in the Arctic (Antarctica only) so nothing to fear.

False, penguins now roam the Arctic as well after being introduced.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#214

Post by mirimir »

mr_overalls wrote: post #5
corpMaverick wrote: post #2

It 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

It's all about discount rate for stuff in the future. If you spend money to mitigate future damage, that's money that you can't invest productively. So basically, in economic terms, the distant future is worthless.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#215

Post by bryananderson »

wuliwong wrote: post #189
LargeWu wrote: post #82

Earlier 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?

Because complexity is the enemy of robustness.

A village that lives entirely off its own subsistence farming, or a band that lives off hunting and gathering, can keep chugging along in merry ignorance of any catastrophe that does not destroy the local food supply (and if one does, they can pick up and move).

A society that depends for daily survival upon massive global flows of food, goods, and information is vulnerable to anything that disrupts those flows.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#216

Post by kaycebasques »

sulam wrote: post #164
pdeuchler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why people don't listen to the scientists, because absurd FUD like this gets spread and it discredits the entire movement. Even the most doomsday predictions are on the order of inches, maybe over a foot in the next 50 years. Such a rise would still be incredibly devastating, don't get me wrong, but it would take about a hundred years of a completely runaway warming cycle to raise the seas a single meter, muc…

I'm quite serious about the historical record. This is not FUD, this is data. The historical record shows that the last time atmospheric CO2 concentration was at the level we are at currently, several things were true. 1) temperatures were 4-5C higher. 2) there was no permanent surface ice anywhere on the planet as far as they can tell. 3) mean eustatic sea level was anywhere from 50 to 200m above current levels. htt…

You really defended your position quite effectively, thanks for the perspective.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#217

Post by txsh »

llamataboot wrote: post #106
txsh wrote: post #99

> In fact, there's more carbon in the permafrost, Douglas says, than all the carbon humans have spewed into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — first with steam trains, then with coal plants, cars and planes. > Scientists don't know yet how much carbon will get released from thawing permafrost or how fast it will happen. In a nutshell why not accepting anthropogenic global warming is scientific and accep…

huh? This has to do with how bad and how quick the feedback loops created by anthropogenic global warming will be and has nothing do with whether it exists or not.

Think about what you wrote. If I am giving you one apple per hour and you are giving me 100 apples per hour, is it accurate to say you are feeding apples back to me?

No, I am feeding apples back to you. I am the feedback loop. You are the source.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#218

Post by mgbmtl »

sologoub wrote: post #193
mr_overalls wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, but the US (and Canada, Australia, etc), still pollute twice more per capita than China. There's still a lot we can do. The EU, however, has lower per capita emissions than China. And that's ignoring that most manufactured goods we consume are made in China.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#219

Post by _abattoir »

mlloyd wrote: post #107
leggomylibro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness ! http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx Spoilers: "...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its…

God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.

I'm sure you, the guy who writes snarky tweets and codes web forms, have a lot more going for you in the annals of history than an internationally recognized titan of literature.

Re: Scientists In Alaska Find Mammoth Amounts Of Carbon In The Warming Permafrost

#220

Post by dane-pgp »

vkou wrote: post #62
matte_black wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part, that the events are necessary or that we have to keep human population to a level that the planet can currently support?

The former. At our current consumption levels/technology, we are obviously above our planet's current carrying capacity. This is not controversial. We are living on borrowed time - our civilization currently relies on the consumption of non-renewable resources, and the non-sustainable consumption of renewable resources. Even if this is sustainable for 10, 20, or 100 years, it is not sustainable for longer time horizo…

It's worth pointing out that for developed economies like the US, UK, and Japan, the amount of per capita energy usage is the lowest it has been in decades:

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/0784d9d63336606d4ca025...

This may be at least in part due to the shifting of energy-intensive industries to countries like China, but it does show that countries can continue to grow their GDP (per capita) while dropping their energy usage per capita, which bodes well for the future.

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