171–180 of 356 posts
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I always wonder about that natural fission reactor in Gabon. They discovered the Uranium was pre depleted in particular mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine Fun to imagine the possibilities.
That was more than a billion years ago, so no.
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Yeah but there is more to it. There are active crisis, like cancer & heart disease. Or upcoming ones like Alzeimer & Parkinson. That in the current day already affect more people per year, then the climate crisis will affect in the worst prognoses in a 100 years*. But Climate change is different, it speaks to the psyche of humans, the modern story of the flood. And in the same way it gives people meaning & without re…
Except that neither of the things you mention affects more people than climate change will. The estimate is that there are about 54 M people World wide suffering from alzheimer. The worst case projection for 2100 for just sea rise is 4-5m on global average (but much higher in some areas) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acb504 To put that into perspective the average altitude of Bangladesh is 9m a…
Whole of Holland is below sea level at the moment. Yet we are miraculously sitil alive.
To take it further, in a 100 years every house in Holland that's here now will still be standing.
Now certain countries don't have the skills that the Dutch have, and we should help them. But this isn't something that will come unexpected, so we have the time to do so. Half of Dubai was created out of the sea.
But, even then 4-5 meters is too much. Worst case is less then 1m. Till now we got 20cm. Expectance by Dutch gov. is this between another 20 and 86 cm in the next century: https://www.knmi.nl/kennis-en-datacentrum/uitleg/zeespiegels...
Back to the medical argument. Even if parts are flooded, which is terrible. Moving away is not the same as not being able to use your brain or dying.
Please, if the title is going to be that, at least remove the capitalization from that "m", so it represents an unity instead of "millions of something undisclosed".
Our software did screw up the m->M thing. Sorry!
Interesting: "Towards the base, the ice is more than 120,000 years old and dates back to the last interglacial period, a time when the atmospheric temperature above Greenland was 5°C warmer than today."
Iirc, the CO2 concentration now as been pumped up higher than it was then, which is in part what is worrying because temps might then potentially shoot even higher. Bottom line: we need large scale carbon capture quickly because even if we reach net zero CO2 will take millenia to drop back to the level it was pre-industrial revolution. Edit: I wouldn't focus on "pre-industrial levels" specifically, the point is that…
Interesting: "Towards the base, the ice is more than 120,000 years old and dates back to the last interglacial period, a time when the atmospheric temperature above Greenland was 5°C warmer than today."
See also this timeline of the last four inter-glacial periods: https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/104-4000... It also shows how crazy it would be if we get the projected 2-3 degrees average temperature increase. Even in a period where we'd expect to be going into a new ice age; instead shooting to a previously unseen high temperature.
Yeah a warmer climate brings all kinds of horrible changes. But food still grows in the northern hemisphere. A colder climate is arguably even worse for us.
By the way, that’s no excuse to keep doing what we’re doing. Limiting warning at 2-3 degrees will be nice. Things get really horrific above 4. At some unknown point feedback cycles really kick in and we go to 5-10 degrees and get completely fucked. We really have to not find out where that threshold is.
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If something has a negative age, does that mean it is from the future?
I can't tell if you're joking, but negative numbers are used to represent years BC.
How might something dated from the future be found? I'm not certain, but maybe it has to do with aliens that are all the rage nowadays.
If I were 12 years old, I would have been born 12 years ago.
2023
- 12
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2011
2023
- -12
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2035
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Pre-industrial CO2 concentration is synonymous with the "natural concentration", at least in the recent past. We made a very large change that has thrown Earth's systems out of equilibrium. Returning to pre-industrial CO2 levels would undo that change and bring things back towards equilibrium.
Like the other reply said, there is no natural equilibrium. We want to return to pre-industrial levels because we’re used to it and we liked it more then.
Scrappy because, well the planet doesn't quite become uninhabitable and we're starting from the end-game. Science fiction also had me expecting some very cool terraforming infrastructure, not psy-ops to get the serfs to eat bugs.
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We have also pumped a very large amount of long-lived fluorine compounds into the air, that will last for centuries. They have from 2500x to 25000x times the "greenhouse gas warming potential", kg for kg. They are mostly refrigerants (CFCs, HFCs, and soon their successors) and transformer insulation gas (SF6). Volcanoes do emit some amount of fluorine compounds, too. We also have a great deal of methane leakage, whic…
I don't know about all compounds but CFCs stay in atmosphere for about a century only and we've already banned them, and methane has a very short lifetime of about 12 years. So we 'only' need to control emissions of those to solve the problem. On the other hand, as said, CO2 stays for centuries if not 1,000+ years so at this point net zero is only half the job though probably the hardest part.
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See also this timeline of the last four inter-glacial periods: https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/104-4000... It also shows how crazy it would be if we get the projected 2-3 degrees average temperature increase. Even in a period where we'd expect to be going into a new ice age; instead shooting to a previously unseen high temperature.
On the other hand if we only have 2-3 degrees of warming, if that’s enough to prevent the next ice age, didn’t we just dodge a massive icy bullet? Might we not one day thank ourselves for doing something reckless and stupid that actually worked out? Yeah a warmer climate brings all kinds of horrible changes. But food still grows in the northern hemisphere. A colder climate is arguably even worse for us. By the way, t…