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Seeker reports on the finding of Daniel Rothman, a geophysicist at the MIT. The layman version in Seeker
...Daniel Rothman, [is] a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who built a database of fossil records going back half a billion years. Rothman found the periods in which large percentages of existing species died off coincided with big swings in the carbon isotopes found in those records, suggesting the planet's carbon cycle was out of whack.
[...] human civilization has been pumping more carbon into the environment by burning carbon-rich fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. On the current trajectory, the oceans are expected to absorb at least another 300 billion tons of carbon by 2100 — an amount that could end up producing long-term changes to the environment, Rothman concluded.
[...] Rothman isn't alone in warning of a potential extinction. Some scientists argue a sixth such event is under way already, with about two species a year disappearing and thousands seeing their populations and ranges shrink.
The more arid study is published in Science Advances and the full text is freely available.
The abstract goes like this (with my emphasis):
The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. What sets one group apart from the other? Here, I hypothesize that perturbations of Earth's carbon cycle lead to mass extinction if they exceed either a critical rate at long time scales or a critical size at short time scales. By analyzing 31 carbon isotopic events during the past 542 million years, I identify the critical rate with a limit imposed by mass conservation. Identification of the crossover time scale separating fast from slow events then yields the critical size. The modern critical size for the marine carbon cycle is roughly similar to the mass of carbon that human activities will likely have added to the oceans by the year 2100.
I hope our grandchildren will be able to live, even if I have doubts they'll be able to forgive us.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @01:40AM (13 children)
Now it happens with our participation.
Wouldn't it be nice to actually decide to use those technologies without really causing the doom? 'Cause that doom will be upon your arse too.
Those technologies will be utterly useless at the level of control we have over the amount of energy involved, for example, in Harvey or Irma or the next ones.
We'll wage an attrition war, until we won't have enough resources to keep pace with the reconstruction effort.
(I "love" you too, khallow)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @03:13AM (12 children)
We don't need to control hurricanes even a little in order to control the harm that they cause. For example, we have three Cat 4 or higher storms that, if they had happened more than a hundred years ago with the population densities that exist today, would have killed thousands or more apiece. But combined they killed a little over 200 people today. We didn't control these storms even a little, yet we figured out how to greatly reduce loss of life.
What war? Who is "we"? Odd how the entire world has instead moved in the opposite direction towards less war and more available resources.
Thanks. I like knowing that I'm getting through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @03:39AM (2 children)
Impact on stock/crops didn't start to be come... yet [reuters.com].
A bit of patience and you'll need to show how one needs to grow hydroponic texan beef, even if runaway won't touch tube burgers.
Metaphorical speaking, khallow; the one you and your crowd declared war on environ.
The sad things is: others will fall victims; the "fuck you, got mine" crowd will too, even if only a bit later.
Enjoy the feeling.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:21AM (1 child)
You do realize that Texas is a big state? Most cattle production is not affected.
Completely delusional. We didn't reduce deaths from hurricanes by at least a couple orders of magnitude because of either environmentalists or the "fuck you, got mine" crowd. We did it by figuring out how to predict hurricane movement and preparation. And why are we supposed to care more about my completely imaginary greed rather than your very real hysteria?
What exactly are you hyperventilating over anyway? Hurricanes don't cause mass extinctions. They can also get much stronger without causing significant effect to humanity as long as we prepare for them and don't build expensive stuff in the way.
Yes, we are likely in the midst of an extinction event and it may well become bad enough to be listed on the all-time worst extinction events. But this is just another scary threat in a world of scary threats. What makes it worse than terrorists who could any day come up with a germ that kills most of mankind? What makes it worse than IP pirates who could make the entirety of arts and literature unprofitable and thus, completely remove the incentive to make music or read books. It could happen!!!1!
The real bad news is that merely inventing a completely bullshit reason [soylentnews.org] for the world to end sells. Linking the current modest climate change to the worst extinction events of the past is irresponsible, but it sells. You can tell because the researcher and journalist completely blow off worse threats for mass extinction than the climate such as somewhere around 40% of the Earth's land area being modified by humans (things like agriculture and pasture, roads, and urbanization) and the current overpopulation.
They also downplay duration, mass of carbon released, and short term variation. For example, mass change is averaged over tens of thousands of years or longer for the big extinctions and involves CO2 releases an order of magnitude or more over atmosphere levels today. There is no information on how the climate changed over spans of time comparable to human civilizations. They may well be much higher than present rates of change!
Let us keep in mind that volcanoes (which are linked with several of those carbon isotope-changing events) are far from constant in activity with tens to hundreds of thousands of years of activity often compressed into a few eruptions (such as the case with the Yellowstone hot spot, for example, which in the past few million years has bursts of activity every few tens of thousands of years combined with enormous supervolcano eruptions on the order of every half million years - a period duration which incidentally is longer than any of the four extinction events (fifth event is ignored due to very different characteristics) that the researchers studied).
The research may well be right, but once again, I'm struck by how conveniently we're seeing research that tells us to act now. For example, there's research [independent.co.uk] that indicates global warming is happening slower than forecast. That particular story says that to keep warming under 1.5 C (increase in global temperature since beginning of Industrial Age), we would have to add no more than 240 billion metric tons (Gt) to the atmosphere while under the older models, the limit would be a mere 70 Gt. In physical terms it's roughly 25 years in current emissions versus 6 years. Doesn't sound that big a difference timewise though the latter is obvious unachievable without some sort of immediate, massive global reduction in greenhouse gases emissions. But how did they come to think that 1.5 C increase? After all, weren't we just a few years ago speaking of holding the line at a 2 C increase?
The problem is that the error in warming rate corresponds to the difference in carbon forcing between 2.5 C in long term global warming per doubling of CO2 concentration and 1.6 C per doubling. That corresponds to the difference between 433 ppm at 1.5 C and 515 ppm at 1.5 under the revision mentioned. At 2 C under the old scenario, one would have more leeway to wait since under the old scenario 500 ppm corresponds to 2 C increase since the beginning of the Industrial Age which is still over 20 years. Under the new number of 1.6 C per doubling, that increases to 630 ppm which is over half a century at the current rate of CO2 emissions!
If we backslide further, for example, to capping out at a 4 C increase in global temperature, we can emit up to 1400 ppm under the lower CO2 sensitivity. That's more than two centuries of emissions at the current rate.
Without the threat of catastrophic climate change at low increases in global temperature, we have no incentive for long periods of time to reduce CO2 emissions. Notice the games being played. Back in 1999, the big question was whether past climates in the recent past (last thousand years) were warmer than present. The "hockey stick" paper purported to show that climate had been mostly flat since the end of the last ice age till present and that the current temperatures were higher than they've ever been. That paper had since been shown to generate the hockey stick due to the warping of the data by the statistical methods performed.
Then the problem has evolved to the lack of evidence for near future harm from climate change. That would be needed in order to have a case for near future mitigation of climate change. Extreme weather and flooding of low lying land was the answer to that with a remarkable display of confirmation bias and dishonest blaming of every bit of weird or destructive weather on climate change occurring.
Now, with a walk-back of CO2 sensitivity likely, we're looking at the next wave of dishonest research. The very low 1.5 C is the new line in the sand that we're not supposed to cross and 300 Gt of CO2 absorbed by oceans, which incidentally is nearly in line with the 240 Gt of CO2 emissions predicted before 1.5 C would be eventually crossed, is the new threshold over which catastrophic climate change and the sixth extinction "may" happen due to ocean chemistry.
We should consider why we're seeing so many dire predictions from modest increases over modern times coupled with such a lack of evidence that these predictions are credible?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @03:12PM
For one capable of digesting scientific ideas you sure suck at interpretation.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 25 2017, @03:45AM (8 children)
The one in which this one is only a battle [columbia.edu].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @03:56AM (7 children)
So no actual war.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @04:04AM (1 child)
Bingo. "Metaphor" rings a bell?
Do you actually need one?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:26AM
Not here. There's no conflict for example, unless we're going to have a war on hurricanes or a war on climate. I'm sure those would turn out well just like, say, our war on poverty or war on drugs.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 25 2017, @05:39AM (4 children)
Let's make a comparison.
Citing from the linked [columbia.edu]:
Putting this into perspective [wikipedia.org], in the "war/recovery context":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @06:27AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 25 2017, @07:08AM (2 children)
"12 years later, Louisiana still hasn’t fully recovered"
"Recovery from Hurricane Harvey Could Take 15 Years"
"Our country is not good at recovering."
vs
1948-1957 - Germany recovered enough to be a founding member in European Economic Community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday September 25 2017, @07:35AM (1 child)
Second, why should Louisiana or Houston recover? Bad locations combined with incompetent/corrupt leadership (a Louisiana specialty) provide a good reason not to bother for full recover.
Some things you don't recover from, because they aren't worth recovering from. If a driver destroys their car while being spectacularly drunk, you don't reset to the start of the failure mode by getting them another expensive car and a bottle of vodka. Sure, that would be a recovery, but a recovery of the sort likely to need another recovery in the not so distant future. I'll note that subsidized flood insurance is of this sort.
Meanwhile Germany's recovery, while very long, is not of the sort likely to result in a return to the failure mode of war that created the need for recovery.
I still think the war analogy is silly. A war on hurricanes or a war on climate isn't going to turn out any better than other wars on ideas, widespread human behavior, or natural phenomena.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 25 2017, @03:46PM
Well, the war on climate is currently in its hot phase, quite literally. Carbon dioxide proved a very effective weapon. ;-)