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Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

williamcolgan.net

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Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#51

Post by MAGZine »

echelon wrote: post #49
MAGZine wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only partially true. You can cut forests down before they burn and finish the product into something that won't just be burnt. Then people can store the carbon compacted, and in their homes. Or honestly, you could just bury it underground if you wanted. Trees are biological mechanisms for capturing carbon. We don't need to invent anything new.

Would it be practical to grow entire farms of trees (or something fast growing - bamboo, kudzu, certain crops), harvest them, and bury the results? Repeat over and over at scale to sequester carbon. You'd need mineral inputs, of course, but maybe you can recoup these.

That's a good question. I suspect it matters on the composition of the wood. Wood that locks in a lot of moisture instead of carbon might be counter-intuitive.

I don't really know what I'm talking about here, I'm just thinking aloud. There's probably some woods better than others, though that's not a very interesting statement by itself.

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#52

Post by klyrs »

edgyquant wrote: post #27
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do large scale catastrophic floods, heat waves, snow storms, hurricanes, and wild fires not qualify as hostile to human life? What is the true scotsman weather and climate that is hostile to human life?

If they do then the Earth already qualifies as hostile to human life

The problem is that the level of hostility is increasing. A caged tiger is hostile but with some sensible precautions, one can avoid harm. If the cage is opened, that hostility is an immediate concern.

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#53

Post by evv555 »

edgefield wrote: post #45
blueflow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the planet will become hostile to human life Example of someone blowing it out of proportion, right in your parent post. The trust issues don't come from nowhere.

Have you seen the news about Pakistan? A third of the country has turned into an ocean. 1,000+ have died. Millions have lost their homes. This sounds pretty hostile to human life. Don’t you think?

Personally I believe in climate change but how are data points like this supposed to prove/disprove? Only ~12000 years ago there was a shift from the ice age and rapid flooding. Probably not man made and very recent. All evidence points to climate change being semi-cyclical and around as far back as we can gather data points. The cycles are very long relative to individual human lifespans but very short and frequent in the grand scheme. To me this is reason enough to make an educated guess that humans can affect the climate with our outputs. But it also makes it nearly impossible to disentangle natural changes from man made ones using science.

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#54

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

blueflow wrote: post #47
edgefield wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the news about Pakistan? A third of the country has turned into an ocean. 1,000+ have died. Millions have lost their homes. This sounds pretty hostile to human life. Don’t you think?

What do you expect? That earth is some garden of Eden where nothing bad ever happens? Climate Change is going to make things worse, but it always has been a struggle, and always will be. Remember 2004, when a Earthquake and Tsunami killed a quarter of a million people? Spanish Flu? The Plague? I don't consider that hostile. Mars is hostile. Or Venus.

So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus?

A decent chunk of the Earth's landmass (where a TON of people currently live) is going to get pretty bad if temperatures rise 3C.

At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure.

This will happen regularly if temperatures rise 3C.

India will be home to maybe 2B in 2050 - when many climate projections say this will happen.

I'm optimistic we won't reach 3C of warming by 2050. But it seems within reason that it could happen.

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#55

Post by mek6800d2 »

enchiridion wrote: post #25
rowanG077 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was meant as you interpret it. Rather a callback to the famous quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

That might be right. I took it in the spirit of climate change advocates who tend to argue for immediate radical change. Underlying those arguments is a belief that we will not be able to address problems as they arise in the future. I think we will. I believe in the power of human ingenuity to respond to constraints of the environment. That’s what I took it to mean; the ability to solve unsolved problems when the ne…

Kind of like stopping a volcano or an earthquake. What happens when the problem gets too far gone and the vaunted human ingenuity is utterly impotent in solving the problem? (I mean the point after which there is literally nothing humans could do to react to the problem.)

To get an idea of the monumental complexities of global warming, I recommend reading The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History by David Beerling. He describes a multi-discipline investigation of global warming involving paleobotanists to atmospheric scientists, climate scientists, oceanographers, chemists, physicists, and the list goes on.

I also recommend googling "planetary boundaries" and "tipping points". Climate change is only one of the boundaries whose transgression threatens us. And the boundaries interact with each other and we don't really know how these interactions might affect rates of change.

So, radical changes now -- bad. Human ingenuity and radical changes in the future on the threshold of global catastrophe -- good.

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#56

Post by blueflow »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #54
blueflow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect? That earth is some garden of Eden where nothing bad ever happens? Climate Change is going to make things worse, but it always has been a struggle, and always will be. Remember 2004, when a Earthquake and Tsunami killed a quarter of a million people? Spanish Flu? The Plague? I don't consider that hostile. Mars is hostile. Or Venus.

So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus? A decent chunk of the Earth's landmass (where a TON of people currently live) is going to get pretty bad if temperatures rise 3C. At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure. This will happen regularly if temperatures rise 3C. India will be home to maybe 2B in 2050 - when many climate projections say this will happen. I…

> So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus?

From Wikipedia[1]:

> The IPCC states that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."

> At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure.

Yet people somehow still survive in the Sahara at higher temperatures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#57

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

blueflow wrote: post #56
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus? A decent chunk of the Earth's landmass (where a TON of people currently live) is going to get pretty bad if temperatures rise 3C. At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure. This will happen regularly if temperatures rise 3C. India will be home to maybe 2B in 2050 - when many climate projections say this will happen. I…

> So is everything fine until Earth becomes Venus? From Wikipedia[1]: > The IPCC states that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities." > At 35C in India - it's believed even healthy young people can die in just 6 hours of exposure. Yet people somehow still survive in the Sahara at higher temperatures. [1] https://en.w…

Way less humidity. Look up wet bulb effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#58

Post by pvaldes »

galangalalgol wrote: post #18
edgefield wrote: post #9

As an aside, it’s striking to me that Hacker News has a significant audience of flat earthers. Don’t look up, right? Let’s be clear, human caused climate change is very real. Rigorous science confirms this and CO2 + methane levels are now driving very visible and catastrophic weather all over the world. The only thing left to debate is how quickly the planet will become hostile to human life and whether some scientif…

Hostile to human life seems a bit hyperbolic. Our technology and society will collapse and stop the co2 addition well before then. Its possible we will have hit run-away by then, but I don't think that is currently predicted? A malthusian collapse followed by a second shot with sustainable tech built on the back of unsustainable ones might well have a chance.

Who will maintain the nuclear plants so they don't go out of control if the society collapse?

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#59

Post by galangalalgol »

pvaldes wrote: post #58
galangalalgol wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hostile to human life seems a bit hyperbolic. Our technology and society will collapse and stop the co2 addition well before then. Its possible we will have hit run-away by then, but I don't think that is currently predicted? A malthusian collapse followed by a second shot with sustainable tech built on the back of unsustainable ones might well have a chance.

Who will maintain the nuclear plants so they don't go out of control if the society collapse?

No one, but I expect they'd get shut down properly as necessary materials became unavailable. But even if they all went into melt down, that wouldn't make the planet completely unlivable. I was merely stating plenty of breeding populations would exist. Hostile to human life reads to me like extinction, and that seems horribly unlikely. Really bad for sure, and we really should start being smarter now to avoid that (we won't, but we should).

Re: Melting ice reveals two-million-year old peat

#60

Post by MrVandemar »

echelon wrote: post #49
MAGZine wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only partially true. You can cut forests down before they burn and finish the product into something that won't just be burnt. Then people can store the carbon compacted, and in their homes. Or honestly, you could just bury it underground if you wanted. Trees are biological mechanisms for capturing carbon. We don't need to invent anything new.

Would it be practical to grow entire farms of trees (or something fast growing - bamboo, kudzu, certain crops), harvest them, and bury the results? Repeat over and over at scale to sequester carbon. You'd need mineral inputs, of course, but maybe you can recoup these.

Not really.

A big part of the issue is fossil fuels. These are essentially vast amounts of carbon from millions of years ago that we are digging up and pumping into the atmosphere. Burying trees is not the answer, not digging up the old ones and not burning them would help a lot.

Also, bury trees and you bury the nutrients they use to grow, locking them away from the next generation of trees and plants. To plant, grow, cut down and bury trees on any scale you also require machines ... that run on fossil fuels.

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