61–70 of 88 posts
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I would have thought that was obvious from the context, fair point though. Although I think carbohydrates is probably more accurate if we’re talking about decaying plant matter.
Fatty acids are not carbohydrates, but are hydrocarbons. Lignin is also not normally considered a carbohydrate.
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The primary negative feedback loop is increased photosynthesis. As CO2 concentrations rise, there's more carbon in the air that can support plant life. There also tends to be both more sunlight (warmer air can support more water vapor before it precipitates into clouds) and more water (in absolute terms, from increased evaporation). Note that in the near term, the negative feedback of photosynthesis may be overwhelme…
Unfortunately, I think human land use is impeding that feedback mechanism, as there are large portions of land area that are not allowed to freely green up anymore.
This is probably cold comfort for the billions of people that will die.
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If uptake capacity is decreasing and CO2 emissions are increasing, which I'm lead to believe is the case, and atmospheric and oceanic CO2 levels are increasing, which I'm also lead to believe the case... Then I don't understand where you're coming from?
> If uptake capacity is decreasing I never said that, and I don't think it's true. The timescale I was referring to is the timescale for uptake capacity to respond to a change in CO2 levels. For example, trees grow and reproduce more slowly than CO2 levels have been changing, so the increase in uptake from tree growth and reproduction takes some time to respond to an increase in CO2. But that doesn't mean it never re…
This indicates to me I probably need to go away and do some research.
Thanks for bringing this assumption to my attention.
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increased evaporation - water vapor is a potent green house gas increased co2 > increased diffusion into seawater - isnt acidity of the ocean increasing, making it more difficult for the shelled sea life to even develop?
> increased evaporation - water vapor is a potent green house gas But its lifetime in the atmosphere is very short; the evaporated water vapor condenses in the upper atmosphere into clouds and precipitation. What longer term numbers I have seen indicate that the average water vapor content of the atmosphere has been roughly constant during the warming of the last half century or so.
We will probably get more water vapor in the future but most of the PWAT ends up in clouds. And that’s where the feedbacks get interesting, cloud height is very important to radiative balance and there are a couple of indirect effects to consider too.
I'm really curious about marine cloudseeding as a potential mitigator to permafrost melt. Essentially, high-efficiency saltwater aerosolization to create nuclei for cloud formation... Here is a 2019 paper on the critical role of clouds in arctic cooling https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44155-w#Sec7
Anything that doesn’t impact co2 becomes a permanent crutch.
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Yet the rich keep buying waterfront properties.
With sea level rise projected to be less than two meters in the next century, why not? Unless the land is extremely low lying, like some sand covered atoll in the Pacific, the property will outlast both yourself and your children. I don't know about you, but I don't sweat what happens to my investments after myself and my children are long gone. Honestly, most of the time I have trouble just planning ten years out.
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And then the whole melting of sea ice thing. Sea ice is pretty much the whitest/most reflective surface on the planet. It then melts into the darkest/most absorbent surface on the planet. Are there any stabilizing forces we know about? I only ever hear about these types of positive feedback loops, and it scares the hell out of me.
Based on geological history, the negative feedbacks seem predominant for small perturbations, but if you push things a little too hard the positive feedbacks take over. It's happened before several times; a little initial heating from orbital variations, which leads to greenhouse gas emissions, which leads to the global average temperature going up several degrees. A good explanation of the evidence for this is in Ja…
I believe this same dynamic will apply to the oceans as they warm. They're like a can of Coke. Heat it up and the carbonation goes away. It's a horrifying positive feedback loop of global warming.
Carbon is not a synonym for carbon dioxide.
No, but when we say "carbon emitter", we're talking about methane and other alkanes... and CO2.
CH4 is itself a greenhouse gas that is more potent than CO2 in the short term... and then it decays to water vapor and CO2 in reactions with radicals in the upper atmosphere.
So, it's overall somewhat worse than CO2 in the short term (since it's not just CO2), and equivalent in the long term?
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Yet the rich keep buying waterfront properties.
With sea level rise projected to be less than two meters in the next century, why not? Unless the land is extremely low lying, like some sand covered atoll in the Pacific, the property will outlast both yourself and your children. I don't know about you, but I don't sweat what happens to my investments after myself and my children are long gone. Honestly, most of the time I have trouble just planning ten years out.