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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

#251

Post by marvin »

Banthum wrote: post #197
jjoonathan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, one day we might realize that we underestimated some critical aspect of climate change. Having overestimated it in the past is not an argument for relaxing today, and is certainly not a laughing matter.

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

#252

Post by seszett »

fancyfacebook wrote: post #213
cgh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's really not true.

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

#253

Post by bsaul »

tzahola wrote: post #30
bsaul wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, what if every of those bacteries whose evolution stopped thousands of years ago are simply completely inapt to compete with the ones we've got today, because those had much more time to evolve ?

That’s not how evolution works. That’s like saying that a dog could easily kill a velociraptor because dogs are 65 million years “more evolved”.

i think that would be like saying a stray dog would be better at surviving in today's world than a stray velociraptor.

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

#255

Post by netrus »

ramblerman wrote: post #245
pizza wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cata…

> 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 So the opposite of Occam's razor?

Think of it as Pascal's wager. We are talking about catastrophy here, the cost function is quite out of balance when looking at the alternative of "Reducing our standard of living a bit even though the catastrophy would not have happend anyway".

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

#256

Post by lozenge »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #179
vkou wrote: post #161

Earlier 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

Getting to net zero emissions means turning off many perfectly functioning power plants before their intended life. It means any emissions that are practically impossible to remove (eg aviation due to the high energy density fuel required) need to be balanced out by negative emissions, which remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere. This inherently (thermodynamically) has a huge cost and little economic benefit (unless you include externalities like environmental effects).

I suggest reading/watching any recent talk by Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Institute, and this paper for an overview:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

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

#257

Post by maze-le »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #187
autokad wrote: post #152

Earlier 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?

All stars become gradually hotter the older they get. G-type stars like our sun are no exception to this. On a certain point in time (currently estimated at 1Gy from now), the energy output of our sun is so big, that the Carbonate–silicate cycle[0] cannot continue uninterrupted. Thus CO2 and CO cannot be absorbed by the geosphere. The breaking of this process will gradually enrich the atmosphere with CO2, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect (a bit like on Venus).

But I would not worry about that. It took 500My for life to evolve from trilobites to humans. This timespan is twice as long...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc...

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

#258

Post by alkonaut »

morganvachon wrote: post #178
mlloyd wrote: 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.

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.

That's what I should have responded when my fifth grade teacher always wrote "NEW SENTENCE!" in the margin, if you stacked that many sentence commas.

I should have said "it's practically poetry" :)

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

#259

Post by rland12 »

ProAm wrote: post #70
stickfigure wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not special With big brains and tools, humans can live in a much broader set of environmental conditions than any other species. While it doesn't make us extinction-proof, it makes us pretty hardy. It is hard to imagine what would destroy all the ecological niches that humans could survive in. I would bet on the humans.

We have a few people who are intelligent, and yet as a whole we constantly try to kill our fellow man and let people go hungry. The only difference is we know our eventual end is coming and the preceding creatures likely did not.

I don't know if it's constructive, but I find it remarkable enough to note that I really don't know if you are correct or if the parent comment is correct.

It's because I'm a human being, isn't it.

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

#260

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

He was very er, gratuitous with his adjectives. Like. Blasphemous, amorphous adjectives that should not be spoken aloud.
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