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The Earth is getting greener

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Re: The Earth is getting greener

#151

Post by fnordian_slip »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #130

This thread is full of people performing a lot of gymnastics to explain how this is a bad thing. I think it's rather beautiful that the earth is compensating and creating a reversing effect. It's like a scab over a wound to give us time to heal it.

I believe "the earth is compensating" to be a much stronger form of mental gymnastics than most other comments here.

For example, the permafrost thawing leads to a lot more greenery, but it would require willful ignorance to see this as a positive thing.

It's pretty much the same as the legion of people who say "the climate has always been changing", without looking at it in context (though a simplified graphic, which Randall probides here https://xkcd.com/1732/ should theoretically be able to show the problem to anyone willing to listen).

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#152

Post by Turing_Machine »

dsizzle wrote: post #123
zdragnar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"assuming no other limiting factors" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

Seems that greenhouse experiments would allow us to get a pretty good estimate for the effect of CO2 on yields, so actually I wouldn't think we'd need to do that much assuming?

Commercial greenhouse growers have been using CO2 supplementation for nearly a century. If CO2 is the limiting factor (which is not always the case), the difference in yield can be phenomenal.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#153

Post by inference-lord »

moosey wrote: post #97
BillFranklin wrote: post #17

The article is a bit all over the place. > So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot. The tone suggests they're afraid of the change, but the article can't articulate why since the reason for the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet. The NASA MODIS project is ongoing and produces data that people…

This winter in my neck of the woods I hear a lot of people saying "oh, what great weather this year", because it's warm and without snow. If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes. What keeps me up at night…

I think this is a funny attitude too, like personally, I don't know why people aren't upset about losing winter, it's a beautiful time of the year. Economically valuable too. Taking a walk on a snowy morning or doing some cross country skiing is completely beautiful. I feel like as a human, we're supposed to just accept more and more outrageous things. Loss of winter? Oh well...at least it's sunny.

To me personally the loss of the seasons is one of the most tragic things I've witnessed.We've had 1/10th of the snow we usually have, it's almost all melted already and everything looks kind of depressing. But I know the lack of snow melt will have an impact on farming too, all this for for what? So resources companies were able to profit a bit more?

In Kyoto, Japan last year year, which is famous for the "red leaves" in Autumn which attracts huge swathes of tourists, had no red leaves. To me the loss of the beautiful spectacle is one thing, like, but also concerning as you said, we've tipped some type of scales but who knows how far...maybe it will be ok, maybe it won't.

I'm working out how to grow food hydroponically because I'm concerned food prices will just keep getting more expensive as this worsens and don't want to be left relying on "global trade" for my sustenance.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#154

Post by inference-lord »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #129
moosey wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This winter in my neck of the woods I hear a lot of people saying "oh, what great weather this year", because it's warm and without snow. If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes. What keeps me up at night…

What are people supposed to do? Just live in guilt and fear? People arent idiots simply because they're trying to make the best of a bad situation

Maybe be a bit more realistic about the situation. It's not that we should go around being depressed, but we should go around demanding more action. More solar, more nuclear, more forest rebuilding.

Not just accepting that it's 72 out and that it's nice, nothing to see here, move along.

Like you said, people aren't stupid and should be a bit more conscious of the actual implications of this.

I think what you're describing is actually denial because facing the reality is scary at first.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#155

Post by Turing_Machine »

Razengan wrote: post #29
DinaCoder99 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We overproduce food for the human race by like 35% right now, we have a long ways to go before we hit a population issue. Regardless of all the hand-wringing certain rich people do about the birth rates in Africa. A much more pressing concern is our lack of any inclination to reasonably distribute it.

> we have a long ways to go before we hit a population issue. I wish people who say that would actually live in the overpopulated regions of the world for just 1 month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Of the top ten on that list, at least 5 would be considered desirable places to live by most people. If the criterion is "better than most other countries in the region", it's more like 9 out of 10 (Gaza Strip is pretty bad).

By contrast, many of the lesser-populated regions/countries are considered to be horrible places to live. As I scan down the list, it looks like there is only a very weak correlation, at best, between population density and "would I want to live there".

Obviously, your mileage is going to vary. Nonetheless, I bet you'd rather move to The Netherlands (#33) than Afghanistan (#153).

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#156

Post by [deleted] »

_kulang wrote: post #138
d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are people supposed to do? Just live in guilt and fear? People arent idiots simply because they're trying to make the best of a bad situation

I think guilt and fear might be warranted as people have had a history of willingly being idiots regarding climate change. Best of a bad situation is one thing. Best of a bad situation which you are party to is another

[deleted]

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#157

Post by nostrademons »

konschubert wrote: post #107
nostrademons wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the environmental argument has been "Save the planet!", when the actual motive is "Save our civilization!" The planet will be fine, because as apex predators, humanity is going to be one of the first species to go extinct with a major environmental change, and then the rest of the biosphere will adapt to our disappearance. Hell, many individual humans will probably be fine, because the ability to ru…

> the ability to run a complex environment-destroying civilization disappears well before all the individual humans do There are self-reinforcing loops of climate change that can cause runaway warming.

Sure. The ones actually likely to happen on earth top out at about 5-10C warming above present. At that point negative feedback cycles (like the CO2 greening effect mentioned in the article) dominate positive feedback cycles (like release of methane from the arctic tundra, or lowered albedo from ice melting), and the Earth enters a new equilibrium.

The IPCC maintains that a runaway greenhouse effect which turns the earth into say Venus has basically nil chance of being caused by humans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#158

Post by pmayrgundter »

varelaseb wrote: post #142
dsizzle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems that greenhouse experiments would allow us to get a pretty good estimate for the effect of CO2 on yields, so actually I wouldn't think we'd need to do that much assuming?

I think what they're getting at is the most common limiting factor for plant growth is almost never CO2. It's usually Nitrogen, or another two of the macro (P,K) or micronutrients.

Actually, they say, first page

"Increasing CO2 has driven global greening: over the last 40 years, half of the world’s vegetated area has undergone greening, of which 70% is attributed to elevated CO2 (Zhu et al. 2016)"

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#159

Post by zdragnar »

pmayrgundter wrote: post #158
varelaseb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they're getting at is the most common limiting factor for plant growth is almost never CO2. It's usually Nitrogen, or another two of the macro (P,K) or micronutrients.

Actually, they say, first page "Increasing CO2 has driven global greening: over the last 40 years, half of the world’s vegetated area has undergone greening, of which 70% is attributed to elevated CO2 (Zhu et al. 2016)"

Right, but the study is titled "ENVIRONMENTAL DRIVERS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH" and the OP comment included the word "agriculture" right before quoting the study.

Seems this whole thing got rather confused.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#160

Post by delichon »

throw310822 wrote: post #148
pmayrgundter wrote: post #11

Related study that blew my mind.. DOE & USDA funded a 2021 NBER study of CO₂ fertilization on US agriculture: "we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of yield growth https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29320/w293...

So one of the climate feedback loops we forgot to consider is more CO₂ -> more food -> more people -> more energy consumption -> more CO₂?

"more food -> more people"

That association has broken in the modern era:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268083/countries-with-th...

These are countries that are not limited by starvation, with plummeting populations.

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