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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

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This shouldn't be the argument anyway. Why not? The reverse sounds more insightful: If the rest of the world adopts and American standard of life, emissions would be much higher. Should we expect the world to adopt a sub-US standard of living forever, or should we address the impacts of our standard of living?

If the rest of world adopts the American standard of life, that means technology continues to progress, and there's a lot more highly educated people innovating. Given that sustainability and climate change are serious concerns now, I don't agree that it will continue to be a bad thing.

This assumes a novel technological solution exists at all, which today is unfortunately still a big unknown. I'm hopeful too, but I'm not sure we can afford to make that our plan.

Thinking about it, another assumption implicit in both of our positions is that emissions and standard of living are directly related. I bet we could address this is other ways. I have restaurants and bars about a mile from where I live, if I could get there without crossing multiple four lane roads I'd drive a lot less and be a lot healthier.

Maybe our technological solutions already exist...

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

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved away from the most likely target, enough that I would be likely to survive a 400 kt nuke.

But how closed are you to post-nuclear logistical chains that would keep you fed and healthy?

It really depends on the scale of a conflict. What I might be likely to survive would be something like a terrorist attack or some minor nation (like North Korea) going crazy.

I don't think there is any public setup in my country that would allow large parts of the population to survive a global collapse in international trade combined with a nuclear winter that could last years.

To survive something like that would require a full prepper setup. Like a cottage deep in the wilderness, with food storage for a couple of years, water for at least several weeks, lots of ammo for the rifle and all sorts of tools, seeds, etc required to start farming when the weather normalizes.

That would be out of scope for me, as it would take up a large part of my life.

Selecting a location to survive a minor attack is as easy as consider the view or access to infrastructure when buying a house, though.

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The optimal CO2 level for plant growth is between 800 and 1000 ppm, as observed within greenhouses. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/... There is no perfect solution. One of the benefits of stratospheric aerosols is that they only stay suspended for 10 years or so, reducing the risk of long term effects. They are also an exceptionally cheap strategy, on the order of a few billion a year to…

> they only stay suspended for 10 years or so And then what happens? Earnest question.

And then we have to do it again, and again, and again; once you grab that tiger's tail, there is no letting go. In the meantime, sense of urgency abated, we would most likely keep on burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, locking ourselves further into the loop.

It is a terrible idea which will almost certainly happen.

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think leaving earth is the solution? The only place we've evolved to survive on.

The earth hasn't always existed in its current state, or for that matter existed at all. Once day the earth will almost certainly cease to exist and intelligence will have to find a new home of some kind. We have probably got a couple of billion years though if we are careful and I have no idea what intelligence will evolve to over that timeframe.

Just a few hundred million years. The sun will be too luminous pretty soon.

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

#465
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I would understand such oversight from the 'common press', but from a university I would expect better. Oddly, of the 16 authors, they credit the first and the last, yet authors are usually cited in order of importance. The writer of this article clearly did not know better. Perhaps she thought that to credit the first and the last would be somehow 'covering all bases'. As others have done, I also question th…

The first author is important as you said, but the last author is almost always the PI or leader of the lab that published the paper. So I guess it’s you that clearly did not know better.

[deleted]

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

#466
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part looked like gibberish.... Maybe rewrite to make it more clear?

From a different comment whose main thrust you also ignored (you are all over this thread with the same fallacy): >It doesn't mean it's locally always +5C warmer than it used to be; it means you're seeing insane temperature swings in a matter of days, constantly - in both directions, it just so happens that the average is +5C.

"Wild temperature swings" is already quite common in dry places. Sahara can be below freezing during the night. The IPCC predicts that Southern Europe will get dryer, so they will have larger variations.

More humid areas, especially if they're near coasts tend to be a lot more stable.

I think these tendencies will remain true.

While introducing more energy to the atmosphere is likely to generate more winds (including hurricanes), it doesn't seem plausible to me that (given constant humidity) this will be enough to cause enough variation in temperature to make farming impossible in most places.

If you have some reference (preferably something like IPCC, as opposed to something that could be fringe), I would be willing to reconsider.

> you are all over this thread with the same fallacy

Maybe you could state exactly what fallacy you think I'm advocating for? I'm not saying global warming is something good and that we don't need to worry about.

I just don't think it's a likely extinction level threat, like an asteroid, rogue AI, nuclear war, an alien invation etc. Unlike those others, it's almost certain that we will experience some degree of global warming, but if that's the worst we will face, humanity will survive as a species.

Also, there is a couple of other factors:

First of all, I think many that worry about climate change (beyond those who honestly think it will lead to extinction) really care mostly about all the pain and suffering that global warming could bring at some point, at least to some large minority of humanity. Maybe also that it will cause a non-trivial fraction of the population to die from famine, wet bulbs etc.

I don't think that's impossible (though maybe a bit pessimistic, see below), but I think the fallacy that the these people make, is to assume that we will have a future world without such events. Historically, we have seen that bad things have happend from time to time.

The collapse of the Roman Empire caused half the population to die off (partly due to colder weather). The Black Death caused a similar percentage to perish in many place. The Mongol conquests resulted in large parts of the Eurasian steppes to be so depopulated that they still haven't recovered. Then the were the world wars, Bronze Age collapse, and the list goes on.

The future is likely to bring similar events, too. Climate change could possibly be such an event. But usually, these events are not those we expect, but rather some kind of Black Swan that surprises everyone.

The second fallacy that some climate change fanatics seem to ignore, and this one by choice, it seems: We're still very much in a kind of exponential technological development. 200 years is a very long time, and unless the technological development suddenly grinds to a complete halt, we will have a lot of new options both when it comes to minimizing global warming and also to survive any warming we're not able to prevent.

People seem to choose to ignore this based on a better-safe-than-sorry philosophy. That's ok when dealing with risk that we aim to reduce to zero, as long as the cost is low. Kind of putting on a seatbelt when driving.

What many don't seem to realize, is that this is a luxery belief / first world concern. For someone less privileged, like most countries in South Asia or Africa (and also working class people in the west), access to cheap energy now is seen as really important. That means for such people, some risk is acceptable.

Kind of like if the seatbelt on your car is broken, and the nearest grocery store is 20 km away. Do you walk there, or do you drive the car regardless. To do that risk evaluation, you want to know the real risk of driving without the seatbelt.

Similarly, for those most affected short term by for instance ending most fossil fuel use, the REAL risk associated with global warming is relevant.

And to evaluate that, it's actually really relevant to factor in that humanity is likely to grow a lot in technological capability to face new challenges over the next 100-300 years. How much is a matter of opinion, but zero is unreasonable.

As far as I can tell, the most likely scenario is that Climate Change is going to be a challenge for humanity. My best guess is that in most places on Earth, people will find ways to deal with this challenge. But I'm open for the possibility that 100s of millions might die because of it.

I also realize that global warming could be a factor leading up to a nuclear war. I really don't think it would be the main factor, though. I consider nuclear war as a separate risk category.

Most wars are caused by nationalism or religious conflicts, especially betwen the kinds of countries that are likely to have large arsenals. The obvious current example is Ukraine. It's not a famine that drives Putin, it's a desire to Make Russia Great Again.

Compared to reasons such as nationalism, religion or even ideological conflicts, I think global warming would be a significantly smaller risk factor in terms of how it increases the risk of global war.

Another huge uncertainty is the what population Earth will have in the future. Already, it's pretty clear that the population in most developed parts of the world is going to decline rapidly over at least the next 50 years. Population growth is mostly restricted to South Asia and Africa now, and even in South Asia there are indications that it's going down.

It's certainly possible that this can be reversed completely, but if the current trend continues (and assuming Africa also has this trend eventually), the population could be halved every century. That means we will be only 1 billion by 2300.

On the other hand, if the trend reverses back to exponential population growth, we may be up to 30 billion or so by 2300 (unless prevented by starvation).

This is a huge gap! With only 1 billion, it would be far easier both to minimize global warming and to survive it. With 30 billion, it would be very difficult to prevent global warming and also much harder to deal with it when it comes.

And all of this hinges on us being unable to develop AGI/ASI this century. Which is starting to seem unlikely. Most of the researches in the field seem to expect AGI some time in the range from "within 5 years" to "several decades".

If we DO develop AGI before 2100, the exact circumstances around it is going to matter way more than global warming. At the optimistic end, AGI may find ways to completely end global warming.

Or it could cause human extinction before it matters.

So it's not that I don't "believe" in global warming. I generally accept the scientific consensus in most fields, as long as the field actually uses something like the scienific method, and is not just a cover for some ideology.

It's just that it seems to me that many "True Believers" in climate change turn it into something more similar to a religion than the actual science it's based on. And that this causes them to only see this single issue, while generally ignoring almost all other risk factors we're likely to face in the future.

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part looked like gibberish.... Maybe rewrite to make it more clear?

Stability in a chaotic system is precarious. Changes, even if small or seemingly trivial, can cause massive cascading effects from positive/negative feedback loops. Sigh, I don’t mean to sound like a dick, but if that’s gibberish then you might want to strengthen some of the foundational understandings around systems.

I'm familiar with chaos theory, and not rejecting issues related to chaotic systems. But this part doesn't really seem well formed:

> It means "5 * the thermal mass of the earth's biosphere" worth of extra energy

Here it seems that the units were missing, at best. The extra energy would be "5K * the heat capacity of the biosphere (in J/K)"

> in an extremely chaotic system that is currently in a local stable point, but doesn't have to stay there.

First of all, I don't think the current state is THAT stable. And when it comes to any disturbance to the stability caused by the extra energy, that's what we have climate scientists for. Specifically, those are the ones that need to assign specific probabilities to the varous scenarios available.

For instance, while it is POSSIBLE that a result of the chaotic dynamics of the system would be that the Gulf Stream got reversed, it seems that the curren consensus is that this is highly unlikely.

However, there are a lot of other effects that would be highly likely, such as an increased rate of hurricanes for instance. But hurricanes is not a state of the whole system, it's basically just a type of weather that gets more common.

So, maybe "gibberish" was not the perfect word to describe it, as I was able to parse it. It's just that it didn't say anything specific. It was more at the level "It's getting chaotic, and chaos is scary", without making any specific predictions or producing references.

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

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another source using data from the "EM-DAT International Disaster Database"[0]. Excerpt from the article[1]: > As we see, over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant dec…

Well, for starters, the graph lopped off the first twenty years from the data set so that it could "start" from the massive peak in the 20s and 1930. The top reply to your original tweet is a retweet of two videos that rebut the graph.[0] It's further skewed by the use of decadal averages, which hid the fact that the greatest peaks included deaths that were either the direct result of--or greatly worsened by, conflic…

No matter how you want to spin it, there are relatively few climate related deaths today compared to the past. Climate change is not causing a rise in climate related deaths, which is what OP was essentially claiming.

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

#469
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to believe that fusion is cheap.

Fusion is cheap if you price in externalties of fossil fuels. Nobody does that because it's political and economical suicide... unless everybody does that at the same time. We need a good proper crisis for this.

Let me be more precise: There is no reason to believe that fusion is cheaper than fission and fission is not competitive with renewables.

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

#470
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.

Gaia isn't really a thing. There are only natural processes, chemistry, and physics, and there is definitely nothing motherly about them; they are ruthlessly efficient.

If that is true of Gaia then that is true of you as well.
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