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We've Already Built too Many Power Plants and Cars to Prevent 1.5 °C of Warming:
In a [...] paper published in Nature today[*], researchers found we're now likely to sail well past 1.5 ˚C of warming, the aspirational limit set by the Paris climate accords, even if we don't build a single additional power plant, factory, vehicle, or home appliance. Moreover, if these components of the existing energy system operate for as long as they have historically, and we build all the new power facilities already planned, they'll emit about two thirds of the carbon dioxide necessary to crank up global temperatures by 2 ˚C.
If fractions of a degree don't sound that dramatic, consider that 1.5 ˚C of warming could already be enough to expose 14% of the global population to bouts of severe heat, melt nearly 2 million square miles (5 million square kilometers) of Arctic permafrost, and destroy more than 70% of the world's coral reefs. The hop from there to 2 ˚C may subject nearly three times as many people to heat waves, thaw nearly 40% more permafrost, and all but wipe out coral reefs, among other devastating effects, research finds.
The basic conclusion here is, in some ways, striking. We've already built a system that will propel the planet into the dangerous terrain that scientists have warned for decades we must avoid. This means that building lots of renewables and adding lots of green jobs, the focus of much of the policy debate over climate, isn't going to get the job done.
We now have to ask a much harder societal question: How do we begin forcing major and expensive portions of existing energy infrastructure to shut down years, if not decades, before the end of its useful economic life?
Power plants can cost billions of dollars and operate for half a century. Yet the study notes that the average age of coal plants in China and India—two of the major drivers of the increase in "committed emissions" since the earlier paper—is about 11 and 12 years, respectively.
[*] Monday.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @01:53PM (58 children)
Just askin', how much % of CO2 is man related, or anthropogenic if you like big words, compared to total emissions?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @02:40PM (16 children)
The better question to ask is WTF is with the angle here. We need to build new power plants to replace older ones. New power plants should be built with the latest technology in solar, wind, and nuclear. Maybe that's too close to socialism for the pseudo-left, who seem more interested in returning us to the dark ages and the feudal era. If Trotsky was fascinated by a power plant built on a peat bog, wonder what he would have thought of nuclear and solar?
Fossil fuels have to go, if for no other reason than they will run out on a time scale that is short enough (hundreds of years) that we damned well ought to be planning ahead. Somethingsomething responsibility.
Eh but let me guess. Coal and nat gas are the only options because otherwise "there is no money!" or "it's not profitable!" Fuck the profit system. We need power. We need power plants, especially if we plant to support somewhere around 10 billion people on this planet. This is an equation we have to make work and can make work, because we want to advance, not regress. 10 billion people living in a clean, sustainable global civilization is ambitious, but I think we can do it. Just not in the capitalist era.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:12PM (7 children)
If you think we live in a "capitalist" era you are pretty deluded. "Capitalists" aren't the ones promoting constant inflation to collect seignorage and keep their Ponzi scheme alive.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:14PM (6 children)
This is hardly off-topic. If you want to successfully solve a problem you need to correctly identify the root cause. The root cause is quite simply that the current world economic system requires infinite growth to not collapse. This system is controlled by central banks and governments. Just read "financial news", it is all about central banks, trade wars, trump tweets, etc.
Here is the current set of headlines on Reuters:
https://i.ibb.co/NZR6B6L/finance.png [i.ibb.co]
Topics:
Federal Reserve rate cuts
Chinese Tariffs
Trump
Us factory orders
New head of the European Central Bank
Hong Kong regulator
Federal Housing Finance Agency
So the only non-government focused story is "US factory orders".
And just look at the circus around every FOMC statement where people all around the world are trying to interpret why they changed single words or phrases:
https://www.forexlive.com/centralbank/!/fomc-statement-redline-20171213 [forexlive.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlinology [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @10:19PM (5 children)
Keep digging, root doesn't end there, is just a little farther to go :-)
This seems relevant to your interests: Wall Street rules [wsws.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @10:44PM (4 children)
What aspect of the actual information there do you think is in conflict with what I said? I see random mentions of "capitalist" that have nothing to do with reality. Central banks and governments and to a much lesser extent corporations are in charge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:46PM (3 children)
Nothing in conflict. It seems like you and the wswswswsws both share a healthy contempt for the Fed and corporations, so I'm hoping they might prod you in the right direction. Your analysis seems to be going in the right direction, especially wrt needing infinite growth to make the system work. The Accumulation of Capital [marxists.org] (Luxemburg) may also be relevant to your interests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:03AM (2 children)
I see a missing type of organization there... but I will check out your link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:06AM (1 child)
Yea, checked it. At first glance it is the same old boring ideas that require mass murder to work in theory and still fail despite mass murder in practice.
If you claim it is different then let me know.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:28AM
https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-or-capitalism [quora.com]
https://eand.co/if-communism-killed-millions-how-many-did-capitalism-kill-2b24ab1c0df7 [eand.co]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:32PM (4 children)
Uh...what? You are claiming that people on the left DON'T want renewable energy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @06:25PM
Pseudo-left--people using leftist language in service of right-wing, regressive agendas that will increase wealth disparity without doing much about AGW. A pseudo-left plan would include finance capital, lots of pork, etc while placing the bill at the feet of those least capable of paying for it (the working class).
A leftist plan would tackle it as an engineering problem and send the bill to the 1%ers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday July 03 2019, @08:30PM (2 children)
I'm not sure about that, but I would say the typical "Left" person is against nuclear. Nuclear is the only real solution. Solar might supplement things, but at really large scales, solar also has an impact on the environment from manufacturing to handling of defunct panels. I'm not convinced wind power can solve our issues, and that's using the highly advanced and compact solid state wind generators. Those have the same environmental foot print issue related to manufacturing.
Considering what is at stake, I think we should be building nuclear reactors underground as fast as we possibly can. Nuclear is a dirty word though, even when we talk about advanced designs using Thorium that are far safer than any traditional reactor.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 03 2019, @08:46PM (1 child)
Well THIS lefty is vociferously PRO nuclear.
I'll take a localized pollution issue over a global one any day of the week!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:57PM
Vociferous here too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @03:45PM (2 children)
A few years ago I did an analysis of how many nuclear power plants, solar farms, wind farms, etc. we'd have to build to replace the existing power infrastructure.
Using extremely aggressive (impossible to attain) construction schedules, it would still take orders of magnitude more years than we have.
In other words, we're trapped in a box with no way out but to suffer through it.
The only question is, how long will we suffer?
The real crime is that we KNOW what parts of the world will be hardest hit, and how many will die.
It's not widely discussed, but the US Govt. conducts and publishes pretty good research on this every couple of years. I have a copy that was published under G.W.Bush. (that's right. Bush, the climate denier in chief, also commissioned and published some damn good scholarly research on the threats we face from unchecked global warming.) The confusion in the public is, in fact, due to efforts by the wealthy (people, corporations, countries... take your pick) to obfuscate the issue. Why do they do this? Here's where it gets messy--
There is only one way to really fix the problem. It's not just energy production. It's also deforestation, farming and pollution that creates massive dead zones in the oceans. The only way to really fix the problem is for there to be fewer people. We are way past the carrying capacity of the planet, but also of our own technology. Like another poster said, we have a $100K income, but we're spending $115K per year. (not 3%, it's really more like 15% or 20%.) This can go on for a while, but sooner or later we're going to have to cull the herd. (unless -- like happened with Malthus -- some kind of major technological breakthrough happens, like, tomorrow.)
How do you achieve that culling without massive controversy??? Simply let it happen. Also move your own family and friends to more survivable areas.
I know, I know, it sounds conspiratorial. That's because it is. If you do enough research and go beyond what's being publicly talked about, you can't help but find this same conclusion.
What about that problem of an economy that depends on infinite growth? It's called a reset. Back when the plague killed 1/4 - 1/3 of all humans on the planet, it was bad at first, but within one generation the quality of life and standard of living shot up to never before seen levels of comfort and stability. Everyone felt rich, because the established infrastructure had been built for a much larger population.
Why am I posting as AC?
You figure it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:55PM
link plz
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @10:41PM
We'd just have to build faster than that. Impossible doesn't mean much when one can scale construction projects to far greater levels than you are speaking of.
How strong is this dependence? When is that dependence going to matter? Even if we have an economy that is strongly dependent on growth, it can "reset" after we've developed far longer longevity, brought the entire world to developed world status, and established an interplanetary civilization. There's plenty of room for growth and an economy that supposedly wants to do that. Let's use this convenient tool at hand to get what we want.
As to the narrative about being beyond the carrying capacity of Earth, there'd be more problems, if that really were true. Humanity and its environment would be under more stress than it presently is. The narrative is poorly fitting reality as usual.
Too lazy to log in.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @02:46PM
It's not the overall percentages which matter. It's that when a system is balanced (in equilibrium, if you will), everything's fine. Disrupting that balance can have unfortunate consequences. Humans are REALLY good at finding ways to disrupt otherwise-balanced systems. For example - let's say you have some kind of large, ill-tempered desert animal which you use to carry heavy loads. Its muscles and skeleton can carry up to a certain weight without collapsing - call that Weight X. (Because go over that, the spine breaks and you have an eX-animal.)
Load up your beast all the way up to Weight X. You're fine, the beast is grumpy but it's okay. Everything's good. Now your neighbor comes along and tosses just one more piece of straw on top because "what's one more bit? What percent am I really adding to the load?"
That straw which broke your camel's back... how important was that again?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:19PM
If you mean the delta y on the graph? probably About 200% right now, though as warming continues there will be some positive feedback loops that will drop it below that.
If we cut our emissions to zero, and let unchecked wildlife growth happen, let all our crop fields go fallow and the like(utterly untennable and no one is proposing it) there's good reason, looking at intra-annual carbon cycles, to believe that net carbon uptake would occur. About 15 billion tons per year uptake. This shouldn't be particularly surprising, trees and brushlands(and oh man corals) hold carbon down a lot longer than cornfields and rice paddies.
If you mean in a strict, disconnected from carbon-cycle point of view, literal masses exhaled by non-farm animals(about 15% of total animal biomass on earth) and produced by geological processes, about 70-90% are anthropogenic.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:51PM (5 children)
That's not the relevant question.
An analogy:
If you earn $100,000 a year and spend $100,000 a year then everything is fine (well, you of course should save something, but that's besides the point). If you increase your spending by a mere 3%, that means you'll be starting to collect debt. And then you'll not get rid of the debt if you just return to your previous spending habits. Indeed, thanks to interest it will keep growing.
You can't say "oh, but that's merely 3%, that's virtually nothing!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @03:59PM (4 children)
That is only true in the case of positive interest rates. Lots of places have negative interest rates now, so you actually get paid to go into debt (eg for a mortgage) and lose money by saving.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/bankers-stunned-as-negative-rates-sweep-across-danish-mortgages [bloomberg.com]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-21/the-world-now-has-13-trillion-of-debt-with-below-zero-yields [bloomberg.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:07PM (3 children)
Oh, how droll you are! Brava, darling!
Except GP's "example" was a metaphor for greenhouse gas emissions.
Please explain how your "negative interest rate" applies there?
What? It doesn't? Gosh, that's such a shame. I knew there was a foul smell somewhere. Now I know what it is -- you talking out of your ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:17PM
Negative interest rates mean more debt -> more unnecessary "economic activity" -> more CO2 emissions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
Well, as you increase the debt (CO2 level) with a negative interest rate (plants grow faster) you can stabilise at a new equilibrium ($103K income, $103K expenses)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @04:25PM
About half of the photosynthesis is done by algae in the ocean. More CO2 means the ocean water gets more acidic. I'm not sure that stimulates algae growth.
(Score: 4, Touché) by RamiK on Wednesday July 03 2019, @05:35PM (23 children)
You might as well stand in a room beset by fire proudly declaring you refuse to run away until the fire marshal declares the fire accidental.
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(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:53PM
No joke, ah well can't fix stupid.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by deimtee on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:00AM (21 children)
When you stand in a room and people keep telling you it is going to burn in thirty years, you probably do have time to ask how and why.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:30AM (11 children)
It's not about the time. It's about questioning if its human-made or not as if it matters.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:11PM (10 children)
Because if the percent of human-made doesn't matter when the Earth is heating up, then it doesn't matter when one is trying to cool the Earth off. You have to understand the argument first.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 05 2019, @09:58PM (9 children)
What gave you that idea? We can engineer the climate by either releasing chemicals to the atmosphere or building nuclear powered plants that remove CO2 from the air. We can divert rivers. We can plant trees in the deserts. It being a natural disaster or man-made means nothing.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 09 2019, @03:56PM (8 children)
The initial premises did. If the radical environmental changes that humanity is currently making to the Earth don't change global temperature (for example, we're already releasing chemicals to the atmosphere, building nuclear plants, etc), then why expect that future such activity will somehow be different?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday July 10 2019, @09:01PM (7 children)
Since just because one cigarette doesn't kill you doesn't mean smoking a pack everyday is safe. That is, even if we amuse the notion current activities aren't causing climate change, it doesn't mean more of them won't worsen it or climate and environmental engineering to "compensate" for won't help.
That's to say, even if we disagree on some figures, we can agree there should be a limit to how much the ecosystem can regulate. And therefore, it should be possible to reverse certain conditions, human made or otherwise, by breaking those limits.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 11 2019, @11:46PM (6 children)
It's more than that. It's like assume for the sake of argument that smoking a pack a day doesn't increase your health risks, but then claiming if you have health risks from other generic sources similar to what is stereotypically thought of as cigarette smoking health risks, then smoking less will improve your overall health risks. You are implicitly continuing to assume what you claim you aren't assuming.
In other words, these things, for the sake of argument, are supposed to have very small marginal harm (that is, an increase in the activity results in small harm). Why suddenly do they have large marginal harm in the presence of some other harm? What's the mechanism? You aren't analyzing well enough your assumptions.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 12 2019, @01:36PM (5 children)
But this is exactly how half-toxicity, infections and the immune system work. Normally you can handle toxins and handle bacteria up to a certain amount, but if your system gets compromised those figures drop. And it doesn't matter if the compromise is over something you did or not. It's there. And cutting on toxins will help.
The mechanism is the science but we've put it aside for the sake of argument and chose to ignore the scientist and just go by logic. And by logic, it's more reasonable to assume limits rather than infinite linear/exponential potential. That is, there are tipping point to large systematic changes that can cause big changes fast irrespective of human activity but that can be averted through human activity.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 13 2019, @04:57AM (4 children)
Except, of course, for the huge range of circumstances where it isn't how that "exactly" works - such as climatology for a glaring example. You have claimed for the sake of argument that a certain activity doesn't increase harm and then claim without any subsequent justification that decreasing the activity can decrease harm. Somehow the marginal harm of the activity has changed without explanation. While the toxicity model you describe above, could at certain points of its range of toxicity, justify your argument (and wouldn't at many other points!), you haven't shown it applies at the half-toxicity points of the model that you claim, "exactly" or otherwise.
I think fundamentally, the dissonance here is the claim that we have a steering wheel for controlling climate change, even though the steering wheel, for the sake of argument, wasn't strong enough to maneuver us even a little into the situation of global warming. You need some justification stronger than that you could contrive situations where this could somehow be true. You now have to show that these contrived situations are applicable.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday July 14 2019, @02:26PM (3 children)
From a load bearing beam to the climate, limits are shared between all real world systems. Climate models, in the end, reflect the fact the earth can't dissipate heat short of some infra red radiation. The exact limits and mechanisms can be disputed, but eventually we have to concede to the fact that whether or not we're causing the changes, they're happening and stuff like limiting greenhouse gasses is a no brainier.
If you want a detailed discussion about the mechanisms you'll have to take it with a climatologist. But I doubt any will humor the man-made or not premise of this thread. After all, the greenhouse model is basic thermodynamics and chemistry and the rise in CO2 levels is such an easily observed and explained phenomena (dig out oil, burn it, measure mass going in, measure mass in the atmosphere, conclude it's man-made) that you might as well ask an engineer to explain alternating current without going into complex numbers.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 15 2019, @03:59AM (2 children)
Which is sufficient once you get to space. Climate models typically don't reflect the more complex dynamics, we call "weather" which can substantially increase the heat radiated to space.
But if they did, they would be subject to the same logical constraints as you.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:25AM (1 child)
I was referring to the classic dealing with the absolute limits of earth's energy production and heating issues: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ [ucsd.edu]
Not sure how space exploration gets you anywhere given that.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 16 2019, @11:48AM
Notice the line that destroys the physicist's whole shtick:
That was one of the first lines out of the mouth of the economist. Sure, the economist didn't cover himself in glory after that, but that line was never addressed. Exponential energy/population growth is not a requirement for exponential economic growth (notice how the physicist shoe-horned the discussion into such things as "traditional growth" in order to hit the right talking points)..
How much energy does it take to know how to do something? Or to live longer? There's a lot of high value things out there that aren't significantly energy or population dependent. Computers didn't increase in speed exponentially because people threw more energy at them
Nor does the economy need to grow exponentially till the heat death of the universe in order to check off some important, near future boxes for us, such as the above knowing more stuff and living longer.
Finally, there is a bit of hypocrisy here. The physicist after all deals routinely with models that work, but only within a parameter range or for a certain length of time. It's not like someone is using Keynesian economics to predict what Earth will be like in a billion years. These economic models are being used over spans of time where it is reasonable to expect that they will work and not deviate much.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 04 2019, @08:37AM (8 children)
What? You think this is all far off in the future? The room is burning NOW. Do you not watch the news? Are you not aware of the heatwaves, the forest fires, the flooding? The coral die-offs and deforestation that is ALREADY HAPPENING?
The grand, unplanned experiment in atmospheric modification is already well underway and the results are clearly visible. The only question is, how much worse do you want it to be for your grandkids?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday July 04 2019, @05:59PM (4 children)
I think whether it is happening now, in thirty years, or never, the correct course of action is not to run around in a panic doing stupid things.
The correct course is to objectively examine the evidence, propose and debate the various mitigation strategies, evaluate the effectiveness of those strategies and implement the ones that will do the most good for the least cost. Funnily enough, that entails research and design and some far reaching policy decisions.
It does not include running in circles screaming about the sky falling and how it is heresy to even think about questioning the High Priests of the Church of Carbon, or The Voice Of Panic on Mass Media.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:53PM (1 child)
That is precisely what has been going on, however the doomsday messages have increased in volume in a vain attempt to reach the brainwashed masses buying the propaganda from rich assholes trying to improve their own bottom line.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @08:48AM
If you know anything about science, then you should know why that approach should fail.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 05 2019, @08:31AM (1 child)
That's precisely what climate scientists have trying to do for the last 3 or 4 decades. It's not their fault you've been listening to big oil instead of them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @08:47AM
Where's the discussion or explanation for the public of the error in important parts of the AGW models? Where's the addressing of the persistent biases in favor of exaggerating climate change? When are those climate scientists going to call out the climate scientists who've made a career out of selling doomsday?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 04 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
Where's the evidence for your assertion?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 05 2019, @07:45AM (1 child)
Take off your blindfolds, and you'll see it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @08:43AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:55PM
Why does this matter? If the CO2 is not man-made, we can just ask for damages from $nature when we all start dying?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:32AM (7 children)
>Just askin', how much % of CO2 is man related, or anthropogenic if you like big words, compared to total emissions?
That *is* the question - but it's not quite specific enough. There are two different carbon cycles going on:
- the ecological carbon cycle, where carbon cycles through living things: plants absorb CO2 to build cellulose, sugar, etc., and animals, mold, etc, eat plants to release that carbon back into the air as CO2. There's an *enormous* amount of carbon flow in that cycle, but it's fairly stable - the total amount of carbon basically doesn't change as there's nowhere for it to go to or come from except as a trickle.
- the geological carbon cycle is that trickle - where CO2 gets sequestered in rock by diatoms, etc. falling as sediment to the ocean floor, along with weathering of silicate minerals into carbonates by carbonic acid (atmospheric CO2 dissolved in water), and the growth or roots and other subsurface organisms that sequester it underground, and gets released into the atmosphere from the oxidation of some carbon-rich rocks that are freshly exposed to air by erosion and earthquakes, and volcanoes of course.
It's the geologic carbon cycle that where human activity comes into play - we're taking carbon that was sequestered underground millions of years ago, and burning it to introduce new CO2 into the atmosphere. Cement production also produces a lot of new CO2 by driving off the carbon from carbon-rich minerals used in its construction.
So how fast does carbon get sequestered?
3Gton/yr from land organisms creating soil.
2Gton/yr from ocean sediments burying carbon under the sea floor
0.054GTon/yr released by volcanoes
So a net of ~5GTon per year is sequestered
And humans? We release about 6-10 Gtons/year from fossil fuel use, cement production, etc.
So, we're introducing about 120%-180% as much geologic carbon every year as is being sequestered.
Does that answer your question?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @01:32AM (5 children)
Without human carbon release your figures have a net loss of about 4.95 GTon per year.
That doesn't add up unless you want to claim that humans came along and started burning carbon just in time to save the biosphere. That is not a popular opinion with climate alarmists.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:37PM (4 children)
You are correct. I couldn't find a decent breakdown of environmental carbon sources, (other than volcanoes that always seem to get dragged up and I felt needed to be put in proper perspective). Probably safe to assume they're similar to the sequestering rates though, since historical carbon records suggest that atmospheric CO2 levels had been holding fairly steady. We're still producing more than those sources, total.
At the end of the day, it doesn't necessarily matter. We can measure how fast CO2 levels are changing in the atmosphere, and we can calculate reasonably accurately how fast humans are putting fossil CO2 into the atmosphere (1 gallon gas = 20lbs CO2, etc). And the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing more slowly than we are releasing it.
It's kind of like filling a swimming pool connected to vast underground plumbing system. You don't know what exactly is going on in all those pipes, but you *do* know how fast your hose is adding water, and that the swimming pool is filling up more slowly than it would if it were sealed. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the pool would be going down without your help.
>That doesn't add up unless you want to claim that humans came along and started burning carbon just in time to save the biosphere. That is not a popular opinion with climate alarmists.
Not until you add an extra fact that doesn't seem to get enough air time: The Earth's climate is bistable - think of it like a ball getting jostled around in big "W"-shaped pipe. It's going to want to be at one of those two bottom points, and if you push it away, it's going to want to fall back. Through geologic time (long before complex life existed) we've several times toggled back and forth between the current "ice house" state, with year-round ice caps and glaciers constantly coming and going, and the "hot house" state it was when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, tropical forests covered the poles, and vast deserts were not uncommon.
The entire history of the human species has taken place in the icehouse state, where the climate wanders between glacial "ice ages", and moderate interglacial periods. Human civilization was born in the midst of the most recent warm interglacial period, we're about as warm as it gets without some major event to heat us up with that extra big shove to get us over the midpoint of the W and sliding into a hothouse state. And we're providing that by adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a geologically unprecedented rate.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 05 2019, @05:27AM (3 children)
Here's a probably unpopular theory.
The rate of non-biological CO2 supply is not controlled by the biosphere. (Volcanoes, crude oil seeps, limestone weathering)
Carbon sequestration, either limestone or fossil fuels is biological.
Excluding recent fossil fuel burning and very short term volcanic spikes, we never see increasing total CO2.
Which leads to :
If the rate of sequestration was limited by anything other than the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, then there would be periods where the amount of available CO2 was increasing. The long stable period of CO2 in the atmosphere is strong evidence that if excess carbon dioxide is available, it will get sequestered. Either long term as limestone, or as increased biomass in the system.
In fact the long slow decline in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere probably correlates well with slowly increasing plant efficiency.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 05 2019, @09:53AM (2 children)
I believe that occurs during glacial periods. Not sure how much - internet sucks too much at present to look. Covering most of your land in ice would seem to inhibit CO2 intake by vegetation - which is an effect not present now.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 05 2019, @12:03PM (1 child)
A geologist once told me that the rate of limestone deposition from shellfish would completely remove all carbon from the biosphere in about 10,000 years if it wasn't being replaced. I assume that too would slow down during an ice age, but it wouldn't stop completely.
Ooooh here's a thought. What if ice ages occur when too much carbon is sequestered by the bio processes. Everything gets cold and inactive, or dead, until volcanoes emit enough CO2 to warm the place up again. Planet gets warm, plants grow like crazy in the high CO2, the CO2 level drops and the cycle continues.
Given the way life adapts, I think the limit on the mass of the biosphere is : (all of the carbon) - (all the CO2 in the atmosphere at the point where plants can no longer extract it.)
The sudden burning of all that coal and oil is a blip on the graph in the long term. Plants will eat it all.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 06 2019, @05:26AM
Hmm, my (obviously 100% accurate /sarcasm) chart says ocean sediment sequesters carbon at about 0.2Gton/year, which in 10,000 years would be around 2,000Gton, which would indeed exceed the ~1,400Gton of carbon it says are present in the atmosphere and vegetation.
That would be somewhat consistent with ice age temperature patterns - a long slow decline across several thousand years followed by a sudden jump to warm temperatures, and then the cycle repeats.
Well, except for the sudden jump bit - and I do mean *sudden*, like +15C at northern latitudes over the course of a few decades. Those tend to coincide with Milankovitch cycle peaks, so the variations in Earth's solar input is primed to enable a transition, but the transition itself is something sudden. Though I suppose a centuries-long buildup of CO2 until the combination of it and increasing solar input crossed a tipping point would explain it. As soon as things started warming enough, thawing permafrost, etc. would speed things up rapidly - you think modern permafrost thaws are substantial, imagine the situation if glaciers extended into the tropics! As they receded they'd expose permafrost that had been buried in ice
Now that I think of it - I've actually heard it speculated that humanity might have helped extend the most recent, unusually long, interglacial period. We developed agriculture shortly after the big thaw, and unlike animals and hunter-gatherers, who move on when the climate cools, farmers have a substantial investment in immobile farms and buildings. And so they throw more wood on the fire, pumping more CO2 back into the atmosphere and slowing the cooling process. That would be something, wouldn't it? If the relatively stable global climate our civilizations have all flourished in were actually an anomaly we ourselves created with our resistance to change? It would suggest that we've been modifying the environment on a global scale far longer than we imagined, and might really want to choose our actions carefully as the length of our lever balloons.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday July 04 2019, @06:22PM
It did raise another one I was curious about. What percentage change is that in the total amount of carbon in the biosphere?
So, I went and looked it up. Biosphere = 2000 Gton of carbon. Emissions = 5 Gton of CO2 = 1.3 Gtons of C.
1.3/2000 = 0.065% per year.
Not critical in any one year, but not something you would want to go on for too long unless you knew the system could handle it. It is also probably less than the other effects we are having through deforestation and desertification.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.