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The Great Siberian Thaw

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Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#31

Post by sci_prog »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #28
xrd wrote: post #23

Is it possible to live in isolated sealed compounds that protect us from all that carbon? Can we build filtration systems?

If only we could invent some kind of living organisms which consume CO2 and emit oxygen! (Sorry, it’s a little snarky!) I’m all seriousness, earth seems to find a balance when it goes through these types of events. Whether we’ll make it through the ride is to be seen.

You are right, Earth does have mechanisms through which it regulates the CO2 and tries to bring it back to "balance". But it is important to note that these mechanics (e.g. increased in weathering) take 10s-100s of thousands of years to take effect.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#32

Post by trhway »

missedthecue wrote: post #7

I wonder how much of the land is going to become farmable now

Not just farmable. Much better farmable like these days in my old town back in Russia. Though in exchange children have seen practically no snow there in the last 20 years.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#33

Post by lmilcin »

sci_prog wrote: post #31
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could invent some kind of living organisms which consume CO2 and emit oxygen! (Sorry, it’s a little snarky!) I’m all seriousness, earth seems to find a balance when it goes through these types of events. Whether we’ll make it through the ride is to be seen.

You are right, Earth does have mechanisms through which it regulates the CO2 and tries to bring it back to "balance". But it is important to note that these mechanics (e.g. increased in weathering) take 10s-100s of thousands of years to take effect.

There are faster, more responsive mechanism that actually saved us from most of the problem for past decades. CO2 gets dissolved in ocean water very efficiently causing acidification and getting into other reactions.

Unfortunately, it seems oceans are loosing their ability to buffer CO2 and this may cause sharper increase in atmospheric CO2.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#34

Post by abathur »

kragen wrote: post #26
vermilingua wrote: post #17

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…

The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to. We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are c…

The problem, as I try to breadcrumb when I find these (most-recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174) isn't necessarily the technology--it's the people.

It's a complex adaptive system where different regions/countries have already drawn their own geologic, solar, and atmospheric straws. Just because PV and wind are pushing back fossil fuels at market rates now doesn't mean entrenched fossil-fuel-deposit-rich nations will throw up their hands, turn off the pumps/mines, and go all-renewable. If wholesale fossil remains unit-profitable to extract and burn for some purpose (say, converting into crypto--or just because 40% of the value of your oil reserves minus cost is still greater than what you have in the bank), there will be a reason to burn it.

On the other side, too, there will be people whose livelihoods come to depend on a different kind of extraction.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#35

Post by kragen »

lmilcin wrote: post #30
kragen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. Filtering out methane and CO₂ is routine for life-support systems in submarines, spacecraft, and, yes, bunkers, so it's not infeasible. The problem is that they cause global warming, not toxicity, and we can't build an isolated sealed compound to protect the planet from them.

> The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm which already has a measurable impact on performance on tasks (compared to 250ppm couple decades ago). Increasing it to just 1000ppm further degrades performance. And 2500ppm makes it difficult to concentrate on anything complex. Even…

It's true that high CO₂ levels cause cognitive impairment, but submarines routinely operate for months in the 2000–5000 ppm range, sometimes as high as 13000 ppm, over 30 times higher than the current atmospheric level but still too low to kill people by about a factor of 8. Subtle cognitive impairments at these levels have been found by some researchers, while others have been unable to replicate them even at 30000 ppm: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29789085/ https://www.nap.edu/read/11170/chapter/5#54

That's why the NOAEL is set at 25000 ppm, at which point CO₂ starts to cause visual disturbances, which I think fall short of "toxicity"; it's more like a recreational drug effect. If the Earth's atmosphere reached 100 times the current level, 40000 ppm CO₂ (4%!), you still wouldn't have a CO₂ toxicity problem in humans. However, you probably wouldn't have a biosphere much longer either, and at that point toxicity to humans would be a moot point.

Also, by the way, the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about." Sometimes people might disagree with you because they know things you don't, for example because their information doesn't come from science popularizers, rather than because they don't know things you do. If you don't keep that in mind, you are likely to embarrass yourself frequently. Believe me, I have a lot of experience doing that.

Less sneering, please.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#37

Post by lmilcin »

sometimeshuman wrote: post #12
EGreg wrote: post #9

"and twice as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere. " "As levels of carbon dioxide rose from 550ppm to 945ppm to 1400ppm, subjects’ scores under most headings declined substantially. (Problem-solving ability also seemed to suffer as levels of volatile organic compounds rose.)" "2,000-5,000 ppm: level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air; poor concentration, loss of attention, increased…

Many stressors have an adaptation phase. It is plausible those effects get reduced with prolonged exposure in humans although that wasn't necessarily the case in mice: "Long-term exposure of mice to 890 ppm atmospheric CO 2 alters growth trajectories and elicits hyperactive behaviours in young adulthood" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34731494/

I think I red a study, many years ago, about lowered performance in Mexico City due to their local higher CO2 concentration.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#38

Post by Retric »

klipt wrote: post #18
narpaldhillon wrote: post #3

I found this to be so fascinating, "At a certain point, nature takes over. Even the most forward-thinking legislature in the world can’t pass a law banning emissions from permafrost."

Solar geoengineering could potentially stop further thawing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering

That’s probably a significantly more difficult problem than stopping pollution as you actually need someone to pay for it directly. And of course we don’t know a good way to only try and cool the Arctic.

You can ballpark this yourself a 288 K black body in equilibrium is radiating as much energy as it receives, at T^4. To drop that by 1C to 287K means blocking 1- ( 287^4 /288^4) or roughly 1.4% of all sunlight. As the earth’s radius 6,371 km ignoring the atmosphere, the classic sunshade at L1 idea needs a surface area of something like 1.7 million km^2. And that’s assuming we didn’t keep dumping any CO2 into the air and ignore the fact the earth isn’t in equilibrium it’s warming etc etc.

A few ideas for getting various things into the upper atmosphere have been considered but reflecting an extra 1.4% or more sunlight would be a true ly Herculean task with any of those ideas and you couldn’t stop as they all decay over time.

Re: The Great Siberian Thaw

#40

Post by kragen »

abathur wrote: post #34
kragen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to. We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are c…

The problem, as I try to breadcrumb when I find these (most-recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174 ) isn't necessarily the technology--it's the people. It's a complex adaptive system where different regions/countries have already drawn their own geologic, solar, and atmospheric straws. Just because PV and wind are pushing back fossil fuels at market rates now doesn't mean entrenched fossil-fuel-dep…

There are surely economic niches where fossil fuels will survive for much longer than the 8–16-year transition period I'm talking about, for example in submarines and circumpolar research stations, but I think the picture for fossil fuels is considerably less rosy than you suggest. Burning fossil fuels requires not only continuing operational expenses to extract them from the ground but also capital expenditures to build machines to burn them with, unless you're just heating your house. And nowadays either the opex or the capex costs more than PV in many places.

Yes, undoubtedly ExxonMobil and Mohammed bin Salman will try to arrest this trend, just as Peabody Coal did. They'll fight like the devil. But they can't force their customers to pay them more than those customers would pay to get the same energy, ammonia, or Bitcoins from a renewable-energy-powered source. If it costs less to replace coal with solar power than to dig it out of the ground, it will stay in the ground. And that's why Peabody went bankrupt and ExxonMobil has been losing money since 02019.

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