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Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

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Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#41

Post by pjc50 »

EGreg wrote: post #25

Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation? This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide). I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmospher…

> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?

There's no money in it? Whereas there's plenty of money in deforestation.

Tragic, but that is the world we live in.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#42

Post by lutorm »

hood_syntax wrote: post #8
taberiand wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.

There isn't really a "worst" case here. We can always make it worser...

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#43

Post by specialist »

candiodari wrote: post #9
taberiand wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere. Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all. > "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency. If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at…

Industry? Not initially, no. Activity? Absolutely.

One theory is that agriculture prevented another mini-ice age. I don't know where in the "believe, but cannot prove" spectrum this theory lies (a la http://edge.org).

"Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate."

Complex adaptive systems. Disrupt a system's equilibrium and you get chaos. Hard to predict, mitigate.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#44

Post by alistproducer2 »

jerf wrote: post #23
castis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much better world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process. Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.

I recommend you read "Money: The Unauthorized Biography [0]" You'll never look at money the same way again. Money is not a commodity even though we treat it as such. It certainly is not a finite resource.

Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#45

Post by thriftwy »

EGreg wrote: post #25

Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation? This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide). I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmospher…

Well, I guess Russia sees a lot of reforestation-by-neglect.

This is usually useless forests and they're not very good because succession fails on them due to unbalanced ecosystem, but that's what is aplenty.

Where would you expect new forests to appear? I mean, Eurasia is so huge it probably has more forests than the rest of the planet combined. Most countries only cover a marginal area of the globe and so they can't possibly cause serious reforestation impace.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#46

Post by mholmes680 »

koube wrote: post #37
EGreg wrote: post #25

Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation? This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide). I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmospher…

Trees are not a carbon processing factory, they are a carbon battery. If they die the carbon will be released again during decomposition. Once they are planted they must be maintained into perpetuity, unless they are planted where they will naturally survive. Maintaining these forests will probably involve energy usage that releases more carbon. We need method of fixation that is both permanent and does not have the…

swedens working on it:

https://qz.com/1010273/the-algoland-carbon-capture-project-i...

(wood burning power plant is the second subject, under How to heat a cold country in the 21st century section)

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#48

Post by logfromblammo »

kdoherty wrote: post #21
taberiand wrote: post #3

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

The phenomenon that is being described where melting ice causes the release of CO2 into the atmosphere seems to have been known to climate scientists, though I don't know whether it has been included in climate change models. There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268... ) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the…

The trouser-soiling moment is when the methane clathrate ices start melting.

They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly boned.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#49

Post by specialist »

cropsieboss wrote: post #26
graeme wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've been misunderstood. Are you saying: 1. Most CO2 release is natural 2. We increased CO2 through our own efforts as well 3. [implied statement you may agree with: this led to a feedback loop] 4. We now may be too late to stop it merely by reducing emissions, if planetary emissions of stored carbon take over and become the main source of CO2 emissions I think's actually fairly…

Most CO2 is indeed natural. We did increase the circulating amount by a very small margin. Large enough so that it accumulated over the years. This of course led to a feedback loop. Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2] If ice starts to melt, we are doomed. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions [2]: https:/…

I believe (but cannot prove, obviously) that we're way past the tipping point. Meaning simply reducing anthropocentric emissions, even down to zero, will not meaningfully impact atomspheric CO2, methane.

For civilization to survive, we must adapt, mitigate, or both.

Re: Alaska’s thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air

#50

Post by lisper »

lutorm wrote: post #42
hood_syntax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.

There isn't really a "worst" case here. We can always make it worser...

The destruction of civilization will probably cap our ability to do further significant damage. If not, then our extinction surely will.
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