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Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

reuters.com

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Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#211

Post by tzs »

john_moscow wrote: post #180
perfunctory wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except a single factory in China emits more CO2 than all the readers of this HN thread combined This is just not true. World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions [0] I would guess a fair share of HN readers are in the top 10% [0] https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-ex...

Still China outputs more than 2x the U.S. volume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Or 1/2 what the US outputs per capita, which is the more relevant figure since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#212

Post by emanuensis »

A form of geoengineering is seeding Fe and P into appropriate places (good currents) of the ocean. This kickstarts aquatic life and removes carbon fast ... and as a by product creates whole new fisheries. It is fast and cheap enough that small countries and multimillionaires (and up) can do it as a DIY solution to climate change ... so why has this not been done, forcefully? There seems to be tremendous social opprobrium! A ~proof of concept has already been done.

~proof of concept

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/24/18273198/climate...

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#213

Post by DuskStar »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #208
DuskStar wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that not having children or killing yourself actually reduces long term global carbon emissions? Because the second order effects start to get odd, here. Imagine that all the people who believed in climate change - globally - committed suicide in some appropriately low-carbon manner. Everyone remaining does not believe in climate change. How long does it take the population to bounce back, and what sort…

Adoption is a thing.

That is true, but its effectiveness here depends on how much of a person's behavior is nature vs nurture. Political beliefs are influenced by genetics [0], why should environmentalism be an exception?

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#214

Post by dang »

samhain wrote: post #193
pier25 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much the individual can do to fix climate change. Even if you went completely off the grid to live in the woods outside of the industrial civilization eating plants etc this wouldn't fix anything. Yes, you would certainly reduce your emissions but this is not nearly enough. Even if a miracle happened and we reached global zero emissions today there are already 415ppm in the atmosphere which will remain th…

The next two most effective things to reduce carbon footprint beyond not having children is, one, killing yourself, or two, killing the board members of a company responsible for the majority of carbon emissions.

Please don't do this here.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#215

Post by pfisch »

dvorak365 wrote: post #21
pfisch wrote: post #7

Maybe I don't understand the ramifications of this, but it kind of sounds like we missed the offramp where we just stop burning carbon. Shouldn't we just be moving to something drastic like a massive sun shade project ASAP?

Climate engineering to stop global warming seems to me like trying to remove a bullet by shooting it out from the other side

I imagine any massive geoengineering project of this scale could take as long as 20-50 years to complete.

We really do need to get started before things get so bad we are unable to bring the massive resources to bear that we will need for something like this.

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#216

Post by dang »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #69
734129837261 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're all dead. And you have no idea. Such panic. Seriously. We'll be fine. We'll grow to 20 billion before the population declines. Humanity will adapt. The planet has been through far worse extinction events. This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others. Humanity will be fine. And every single generation will keep whining about "WOE IS US, THE END IS NEAR!" for all eternity. I believe in climat…

"This one isn't even remotely impressive compared to the others." This one is provoked by your mindset and it is going to make life unsustainable for everyone you know. It is called science bitch. "I believe in climate change" Do you also believe in gravity ?

Commenting like this will get you banned here. Please review the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#219

Post by acqq »

emanuensis wrote: post #212

A form of geoengineering is seeding Fe and P into appropriate places (good currents) of the ocean. This kickstarts aquatic life and removes carbon fast ... and as a by product creates whole new fisheries. It is fast and cheap enough that small countries and multimillionaires (and up) can do it as a DIY solution to climate change ... so why has this not been done, forcefully? There seems to be tremendous social opprob…

From the text: "George argues that the project succeeded at capturing carbon too. There’s no available evidence to back him up — it’s exceptionally difficult to measure the carbon captured by experiments like these, and the results from more carefully controlled experiments are not promising."

Re: Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years earlier than predicted

#220

Post by ForHackernews »

acqq wrote: post #167
ForHackernews wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an inaccurate summary at all. You're objecting to the use of dramatic language, but the content is accurate: Watts: "Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated." https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15... "Limiting global warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C could result in around 420 millio…

The actual quote from IPCC text about hundreds of millions people affected is: "Liu et al. (2018) studied the changes in population exposure to severe droughts in 27 regions around the globe for 1.5°C and 2°C of warming using the SSP1 population scenario compared to the baseline period of 1986–2005 based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). They concluded that the drought exposure of urban populations in most…

It's not "distorted" at all!

At +1.5 C, they're predicting that "only" 350.2 million more people will be exposed to severe drought compared to the baseline period. That's exactly what Watts says.

What do you think is distorted? You're mad that he didn't mention the ±158.8 million error bars on that estimate?

I feel like I'm talking to a crazy person here -- how do you read the exact same text and see "distortion" when it literally restates the same thing the dry scientific prose says.

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