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Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

today.oregonstate.edu

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Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is very real #2 is warmongering #3 will be solved by human ingenuity I have a more positive outlook. :)

> #3 will be solved by human ingenuity It already started, billions of dollars in losses, with no real solution in sight.

There will always billions in losses from something, especially when global wealth is estimated to be around 450 trillion. The Dust Bowl was a disastrous incident of climate change, yet it didn't occur because of CO2. The damage caused by the California Wildfires are just as much a function of expanding developments into forests, immediately putting out small fires leading to the accumulation of fuel over time, and opposition to controlled burns. Property damage and deaths from flooding are mostly a function of population growth in the developing world, without sufficient corresponding investment in water management infrastructure.

Regarding the solution, stratospheric aerosol injection would be the most immediate and effective solution to rising temperatures. It's been estimated that current increases in CO2 have a radiative forcing effect of about 2 watts per square meter, compared to the total solar irradiance of 1361 W/m2. If CO2 levels doubled to 800 ppm then it's estimated this would have a radiative forcing effect of 6 W/m2. This scenario would require mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection to reduce solar irradiance by about 0.4%. In the context of plant growth this reduction in sunlight would be negligible given that photosynthesis is only 1 to 2% efficient. If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% due to the CO2 fertilization effect at 800ppm.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#182

Climate change is unavoidable. People should start moving to highland now.

And did you do it?

I did. Northern Appalachian/Allegheny Plateau region. Lots of cheap real estate with low natural disaster risk.

Also a great region for small scale agriculture. Climate change might even help this region's arability.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#183

The title is misleading, the article does not claim the current rise is “natural”, they just compared it to prehistoric records which were natural

The title is also misleading in that the paper (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2319652121) doesn't claim to determine when the fastest rates of CO2 rise have been. In fact, it starts by saying cores generally can only support analysis of durations >100 years.

I take note of this because I've looked at this problem before and agree that core samples have a hard time supporting claims like "most in the previous XXkya" when compared with the last few decades, be it CO2, CH4, avg temp d02, etc.

Starting with layers as recent as 30kya, the age of the trapped gas often spans multiple centuries, and so e.g. you'd be averaging out point outgassing from even very large volcanoes well beyond detectability. Beyond 50-60kya, the layer durations are all in the few millennia range.

Here's my analysis worksheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p793c3NZFp2e80ufqyJK...

Reference data: Antarctic Ice Core 155,000 Year CO2 and Gas Stable Isotope Data - Eggleston, S.; Schmitt, J.; Bereiter, B.; Schneider, R.; Fischer, H. 2016. Evolution of the stable carbon isotope composition of atmospheric CO2 over the last glacial cycle. Paleoceanography, 31. doi: 10.1002/2015PA002874 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/19942

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting off a few nukes could slow climate change a bit right? I vaguely recall that all the dust kicked up by the hundreds of tests in the 50s and 60s had an effect.

Possibly, but you have to keep doing it. kicking up dust into the atmosphere tends to have significant short-term impact on the global climate (see e.g. volcanic winters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter ). Then the dust settles shortly and everything returns to normal. But volcanic eruptions that cause a winter like that tend to be quite a bit more powerful than your average nuclear weapon. More importa…

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Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#185
post #39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It was US business who drove the outsourcing led by companies like Apple or Walmart. Otherwise each IPhone would cost 10.000 dollars...

Because of opportunities created by China.

When walmart moves into a town and kills the local shops, is it Walmarts fault for bringing cheaper prices or is the locals fault for moving all their shopping to walmart?

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#187
post #104
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Mother' Gaia will wipe all complex life from this planet with 1 to 1.5 Billion years if her 'undisciplined' puppies don't find a way to leave this ball of dirt. She's also got quite a lead with killing off 99.99999% of all species that ever lived, when compared to us.

Everyone hell bent on leaving is actually distracted from the real less immediately glamorous challenge, which is learning to sustain life and exercise restraint.

They’re probably referring to the earth getting enveloped by the sun in a billion or so years as it expands.

I still think you’re right though. The better plan is staying on earth. The trick is moving it outward as the habitable zone expands with the sun. Only have to convince humanity to sling a giant meteor just outside earth’s orbit every year for millions of years without messing up. What could go wrong?

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#188
post #3

We are in the multilayered race between - The risk of the rise of AGI - The risk and madness of Nuclear conflict - The risk of runaway Climate change My money is on Mother Gaia. She will brutally and swiftly discipline her puppies.

I'm not that worried about nuclear conflict because it's a scenario where literally nobody wins. There's always the "Madman" hypothesis but really that's no way to do geopolitical analysis. Nobody is truly "crazy" (IMHO). Remember those orders have to be carried out by someone. They've studies on this with missile silo operators and they had a disturbing or comforting (depending on your POV) tendency to not launch.

It's really the "slow death" scenarios that are a much bigger risk.

While I'm firmly in the AGI camp, I'm both fatalistic about our willingness to do anything about it but I'm also highly skeptical of the "runaway climate change" doomsaying. The Earth has been around for ~4.5 billion years. While it's only been similar to what it is now for th elast 300 million or so, that's still a really long time. We've had periods where ice extended to the equator (~500 million years ago). We've had much warmrer periods.

The Earth will be fine. We however might fall by the wayside. There's really been such a long period of time that if runaway climate change were going to happen, why hasn't it happened already?

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI by 2030 is not a reach statement at all anymore. The LLM's we have today weren't supposed to show up until 2030 at the earliest and 2050 more realistically. If you go back 10 years and read what people were writing about AI progress, you will find that they were _completely_ off the mark. It's prudent to assume a very liberal timeline for AI progress, based off whats been happening now.

10 years ago we just had another AI hype. I want to see delivered promises & my job automated before i change my mind.

Every promise has over delivered by a decade or more, so don't worry, you'll likely have your legs up 20 years faster than promised.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#190

> Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years Natural CO2 rise?

If I understand the paper correctly,

Southern Hemisphere westerly winds are intensifying due to a natural cycle on the scale of decades. This makes the southern ocean warmer (and the arctic colder, but the ocean is mostly in the south). Warm water doesn't take up so much carbon dioxide. (Water takes up carbon to produce carbonic acid, so if the water is warmer it incidentally reduces ocean acidification, a possible benefit?)

Or it might be about convection.

> The drivers and source of these centennial-scale CO2 jumps are unknown. The proposed mechanisms include enhanced ocean–atmosphere CO2 exchange in the Southern Ocean (via wind-driven upwelling of carbon-rich deep waters or invigorated convection), surface ocean temperature changes (impacting CO2 solubility), biomass burning (via NH subtropical wildfires), or a combination of mechanisms.

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