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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

#221
post #163
post #107

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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 think part of it is that this comes near the end of the book and a lot of it is referring to stuff that had previously been established, and part of it is that the style of writing that was en vogue a century ago is kind of hard to read today. I mean, here's a bit from the beginning of the contemporary classic Ulysses: > Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thri…

Ulysses was never really considered “easy reading”, though ;)

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

#222
post #107

Earlier 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.

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.

Lovecraft is sort of the B movies of literature: Fun as hell, inventive, wild, unexpected, crazy at times. But, not great literature.

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

#223

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I loved that one! He can take the form of other people but is hive-like or something so if you heat his blood the host goes nuts? Something like that anyway. Kurt Russel. The claymation was excellent: cult classic.

That's mostly from John Carpenter's The Thing, the blood reacted to heat as our protagonist's test for detecting infected hosts, not causing the host that was tied up to react, that was just the thing transmogrifying. There's also a Pournelle novel where a research team lands on a green, human inhabitable planet and a native species looks something like a monitor lizard but can engage a hyper mode that speeds up it's…

"The Legacy of Heorot"

It was a first human colony story. The creature is called "Grendel". No more spoilers...

If there was ever a sci-fi novel that should be made into a movie it's that one, IMHO.

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

#224
post #107

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>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.

Then you understood it perfectly. Froth, penguins. The rest was poetic repetition.

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

#225
post #210

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The national roadmap is absolutely massive amount of R&D going into self driving cars for example or solar batteries

What exactly do self-driving cars have to do with reducing our carbon footprint? Hell, self-driving cars are the absolutely wrong solution to this problem. Personal automobiles - a 4,000lb steel and rubber box that drives a single 160lb human around, are incredibly wasteful, energy-inefficient luxuries. Trains, buses, bicycles, and better urban planning are the real solution to low-carbon personal transportation. The…

Self-driving cars might make using taxis cheaper than owning a car, which will mean car users don't have to worry about how long it takes to recharge an electric car's batteries any more, or what their range is.

Electric cars (when their batteries are plugged into the grid) could also potentially make a good distributed battery, making renewable energy sources seem more reliable.

There is a good recent article about the battery system Tesla set up in Australia:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/26...

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

#226
post #123

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We tend to believe our current level of civilization is stable because it got never challenged by climate changing this fast. Probably it is not about ending all human culture but about rolling back decades or centuries in a lot of regions. I remember how Sandy interrupted gas supply in New York. People took extreme measurements to get what was 'needed' - civilized was something different. Just because English lacks…

If you want climate change to be taken seriously don't use extreme language. Otherwise it's too easy to be called alarmist and nothing will happen.

If you want climate change to be taken seriously don't use half-hearted language. Otherwise it's too easy for the problem to be called insignificant and nothing will happen.

Unfortunately no matter what strategy is taken, someone will complain at how the message is phrased.

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

#227

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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.

It's like whack a mole. The economy is a global system, and so is the atmosphere. Shifting production of carbon between the parts isn't per se useful.

We can no more blame other countries for increasing CO2 output than we can blame a grocery store down the block from opening when another closes (or, refuses to cater to new demand, to make a better analogy).

We'll only stop if we come up with an unambiguously better alternative, or something forces us. A acute problem is that if we stopped using carbon, people would die. (And the economy would contract, of course, but death is a stronger motivator).

We're above our carrying capacity without carbon use. But if we keep using it, we die, later.

I think the most no brainer approach is to push for a global carbon tax to prod development of renewables. Income taxes could be cut to offset, so at a low level this wouldn't hurt a country. This seems not very popular however, and no one has pushed for an international agreement on this point, instead pushing for whack a mole emissions reductions in single countries.

My most optimistic scenario is we do figure out an unambiguously better alternative, switch to it, and then also figure out some way to use the energy to suck carbon from the atmosphere (which has its own challenges).

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

#228

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"all human civilization"? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic? destructive, sure. It would certainly lead to a lot of death, and a lot of hardship. Human civilization will certainly be changed- perhaps significantly. But I haven't see any evidence that it will cease to exist.

The resilience of humanity may actually be inversely proportional to its population. Yonatan Zunger, of Google, writing nearly five years ago, tossed out a fact that's stuck with me since: the response of "large animal" populations to global temperature changes: "When the biota of a planet get rewritten, the creatures that require the most delicate maintenance die first. This tends to mean really big creatures, that…

I think that there is a swarming aspect to humanity, in the sense of locusts or passenger pigeons.

Here's what I mean by that: For some species the survivability rate is inverse to the population density- the habitat fills up and a natural equilibrium results. But for other species there is a range of population densities where the survivability rate is positively correlated with population- so the more you have, the better they survive. Any species that moves in large herds is like that- the predators get full, they can't eat any more, and the dent the predators can make on the population is negligible. We are like that too; the more of us there are, the more we can specialize tasks and support each other, and the faster our population increases. (Up to some limit).

Swarming species are more delicate than they look though- passenger pigeons are a good example. Once some external force pushes the population below a certain level, the remainder have a much much harder time surviving. I don't know if people appreciate how easily a good nuclear war could cause the total extinction of humanity- once we lose the big interconnected economy, with all the easy to find resources gone, we could really be f*ed.

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

#229
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…

It's also true that there's no DEFINITIVE ABSOLUTE PROOF that pressing the nuclear launch button will clause a MAD-style nuclear escalation.

But still, there's good reason to believe it would, so it'd be irresponsible to push the button given other reasonable alternatives.

"You can't ever know FOR SURE that this destroy life as we know it!" has to be the least logical form and most confusing of climate change skepticism out there. The fact that anyone would consider this argument, on its own, even remotely compelling, is... oy.

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

#230

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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.

No, that doesn't happen until 5 billion years into the future.

The Sun will gradually keep getting hotter and slightly more luminous up to that point.

Earth will be a desert long before the Sun exhausts nuclear fuel to start expanding and becoming a red giant.

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