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Earth has been trapping heat at an alarming new rate, study finds:
The amount of heat trapped by Earth's land, ocean, and atmosphere doubled over the course of just 14 years, a new study shows.
To figure out how much heat the earth was trapping, researchers looked at NASA satellite measurements that tracked how much of the Sun's energy was entering Earth's atmosphere and how much was being bounced back into space. They compared this with data from NOAA buoys that tracked ocean temperatures — which gives them an idea of how much heat is getting absorbed into the ocean.
The difference between the amount of heat absorbed by Earth, and the amount reflected back into space is called an energy imbalance. In this case, they found that from 2005 to 2019, the amount of heat absorbed by Earth was going up.
[...] The researchers think that the reason the Earth is holding on to more heat comes down to a few different factors. One is human-caused climate change. Among other problems, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the more heat they trap. It gets worse when you take into account that increasing heat also melts ice and snow. Ice and snow can help the planet reflect heat back into space — as they disappear, more heat can be absorbed by the land and oceans underneath.
There's another factor at play too — natural changes to a climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Between 2014 and 2019, the pattern was in a 'warm phase' which caused fewer clouds to form. That also meant more heat could be absorbed by the oceans.
Journal Reference:
Norman G. Loeb, Gregory C. Johnson, Tyler J. Thorsen, et al. Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth's Heating Rate, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093047)
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Saturday June 26 2021, @02:08PM (10 children)
Three things.
1) You are projecting your own views, values, and opinions and asserting them as something that is universal. For instance many, including myself, would never want to live in an apartment [again]. So just because you're happy to give something up, does not mean others are.
2) These sort of sacrifices don't even begin to scratch the surface. Last year we engaged in persistent self destructive economic shutdowns, all but entirely killed international traffic and domestic wasn't far behind it, and so on. And the total emission decline was less than 6%. In other words everything we did last year barely even moved the needle. And that leads to #3.
3) The world is not in stasis. As countries develop, they use more energy. As new technologies develop, they use more energy. As populations grow, they use more energy *. The point of this all is that in the future we're going to be using vastly more energy meaning even greater sacrifices.
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* = If you're not up to date with the latest on population projections [wikipedia.org] the whole 'declining population' stuff has been changed. Now the population is up, up, and away - at least for the next century. The decline hypothesis based on a correlation that, in my opinion, was always "obviously" spurious. It was the whole education + wealth => low fertility. That was not true in the past and so it made no sense why it would be true, as a causal factor, in modern times. Instead the correlation was likely just driven by shared social values in the countries that tended have high education + wealth.
So now all we're seeing is a demographic shift. Low fertility populations will effectively die out while high fertility populations will increase rapidly enough to make up for that decline and then some on top.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday June 26 2021, @06:53PM (9 children)
You're talking all sacrifice. Of course the right sorts of sacrifices will be very effective, but I'm saying there are things that are not sacrifices, that are good for both us and the problem of Global Warming. And we're not doing them. I gave a few examples, and you said hardly anything about any of them, just that you won't go back to living in an apartment. What is not to like about reducing rush hour traffic? Is it that you simply don't believe it can be done, without sacrifice? You don't think it's enough to make a difference?
> And the total emission decline was less than 6%.
Let's say it was 5%. If you aren't disappointed, you sure sound like it. What world do you live in that a 5% decline in the cause of a problem is disappointing? Especially when we were expecting it to be an increase?
> As countries develop, they use more energy.
Not necessarily. Developments can be improvements in efficiency that result in less energy use.
> in the future we're going to be using vastly more energy meaning even greater sacrifices
What a gloomy outlook. Make it sound like we're helpless. What is your view of sacrifice? That it's a horrible, awful thing that is soooo unfair to ask, of anyone? That calls for it are being abused to trick people into depriving themselves? As for that Malthusian fear fest about population growth, life has had this problem ever since there has been life. Unrestrained growth that leads to catastrophic collapse is obviously bad. Life has evolved various means of restraint. They're not perfect and don't avert every tragedy, but they're a lot better than nothing.
Frankly, your whole tone sounds like childish helplessness. Despair. And it may be fake, having the disingenuous purpose of excusing yourselves from having to think, let alone do anything whatsoever, about the problem. What would you propose? I did not see any recommendations from you.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Saturday June 26 2021, @08:38PM (8 children)
The reason I didn't go much further into the other things you proposed is because of the point I was making, which was perhaps not clear. The lockdowns we carried out last year generally encompassed the breadth of your ideas (such as reducing road traffic), and vastly more such as all but entirely killing off air traffic for much of the year. These lockdowns were both extreme and economically/socially unsustainable, yet the entire outcome was indeed extremely disappointing. Bear in mind that 5% decline is not now an annual 5% decline, but a 1-off thing. If we repeated everything we did last we'd be right back to small increases due to the things mentioned (development, population growth, etc). And if we go back to the status quo? We'll undo that 5% and add some on top.
In other words unsustainable behavior did not even really scratch the surface of what's really needed to do anything. You need to do vastly more, it needs to be done on a global level, and it needs to be persist for the remainder of humanity's existence. And we live in a world where we still can't get people to abide really difficult requests like 'How about we not kill each other.' This isn't happening. This outlook is not gloomy, nor positive. It's realistic. Solutions? In my opinion the only practical one is atmospheric scrubbing. And the tech [harvard.edu] (among countless others) is already viable. It's just an economic question and the point that the urgency of resolving our emissions becomes balanced against our willingness to pay to make something happen, it will be done.
As for the motivations of those calling for more micro-level style change, I think, as always, it's mostly just a bunch of folks working for all sorts of different self interested motivations:
- Many well intentioned people just genuinely trying to do whatever they can to make the world a better place, often with a, perhaps subconscious, desire to find meaning in their life.
- Some politicians doing so because they like the benefits of such (higher taxes, greater government power/centralization, and a more globalist world which benefits corporate interests)
- The media doing so because fear generates clicks, '10 quick tricks to save the world' generates even more.
- Researchers live in a world of publish or perish. And if you go for these ideas, it leads to effectively infinite possibilities for relatively low-effort publishing, to say nothing of all the juicy grants.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday June 27 2021, @01:07AM (7 children)
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Alright, so you feel that taking a few steps will be ineffective. True enough, a few people turning off a few lights won't amount to much.
One thing that does matter is technological improvement. All through the 1980s and 1990s, I tried to reduce electricity usage at my parents' home, and made basically no progress. Used about 10,000 kWh a year no matter what. But in the 2000s, I finally made serious progress, thanks to technological improvements. CFL lighting is a lot, lot more efficient than incandescent, and now, LED lighting is even better. Fluorescent got better too, with the old 40W tubes replaced first with 32W, and then an even more efficient bulb, but now of course they've all been superseded by LED. The tube screens have all been replaced by flat screens. Tube screens take roughly 100W (varies greatly depending on brightness and resolution), flat screens are just 20W for the smaller ones, which at 24" are still larger than most tube screens were. Computer power supplies were horribly inefficient, so much so that 70% was actually something to brag about. Then came the 80plus program, and now, there's hardly any power supply that's below 80%. 90% efficiency is common now. A/C got much more efficient, with typical pre-1990s units having SEERs of 8 or even 6. The standard was bumped up to 13, and now I understand it is 16. These things mattered. They mattered a lot. The electricity usage of my parents' home dropped down to 5200 kWh by the 2010s. That kind of change across an entire nation will have a noticeable effect.
Cars have also advanced. While most of the gains have been poured into more performance and the devil with efficiency, they still are better. You don't have to do anything to reap these gains. Indeed, you have to work to avoid them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday June 27 2021, @01:35AM (1 child)
I agree with most of what you wrote, and I think Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org] is being subverted for electricity usage. But TV power consumption has rebounded [flatpanelshd.com], in part because of the ever-larger average sizes but also the move to higher resolutions like 4K/8K (made clear with laptop panels, same size + higher resolution = worse battery life). Oh, and increased brightness for HDR purposes, and families can afford to have 5 cheapo TVs around the house instead of 1-2. I think MicroLED will eventually bring it under control. Here's a source [ledinside.com] that claims the "average power consumption of [a] 55-inch Micro LED display can be below 5W". VR virtual displays would sip power.
You can get a decent computing performance from low-power SBCs or smartphones these days, and we could see further improvements if monolithic 3D improves performance but can't dissipate huge amounts of heat (no more 100+ Watt CPUs). That's just a guess.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday June 27 2021, @06:19PM
I am aware of the notion, though I didn't know it was called Jevon's paradox. It certainly holds with computing power. Tremendous advances in graphics and other capabilities, memory, speed, and storage have only served, it seems, to whet the appetite for more. I had guessed, wrongly, that because 24 bit True Color surpasses what our eyes can see, there'd be no appetite for even more depth, but there's 30 bit Deep Color, and on up to 48 bit. And it does make sense, as necessary for polished image processing work.
I'd say there's room for more nuance. Travel, for instance, costs time as well as energy. One of the things about our current society is that we've shrugged off this great expenditure of time. It used to be that traveling to the next county, 30 miles away, was thought a longish trip, not to be done regularly. Now though, that same trip, if it is within a great metropolis, seems more local. It's crazy how far people are expected and willing to commute to a job. Worse, I know people who were suckered into making house calls all over a large city, for no extra pay, because it didn't occur to them that all that travel was costly, they're so conditioned to driving long distances and thinking nothing of it. I pointed out that $30 per hour, with the employer paying only for time spent at the site, was a ripoff when the employee had to spend an unpaid hour in travel time for each paid hour. Lowered the effective pay rate to $15 per hour. Yeah, sure, the employee got to deduct travel expenses from his income tax, but that's no real compensation, that's merely an offset for all the fuel use and wear and tear on the employee's privately owned vehicle.
Anyway, no matter how cheap fuel gets, travel still takes time, and reductions in energy use will therefore not all be taken to increase consumption. Travel speed could be increased, of course, but there are many challenges towards making, say, 120 mph the new standard in ground travel speed.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Sunday June 27 2021, @04:01PM
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
Now this cuts to the heart of our disagreement! A much more appropriate metaphor here would be a race. Because we're trying to catch up to a moving target, and any break we take - it moves (relatively speaking) even faster away, leaving us ever further behind. Last year we engaged in a colossal sprint giving it all we can had and then some. And we closed 5% of the distance. Except now as we're bent over trying to catch our breath, our target is racing away faster than ever. And that 5% will probably fall to around 2% this year, and by next year he'll be further away than ever.
I absolutely agree with you that technology can provide benefits in efficiency. Yet those benefits are overshadowed by our continuing monumental growth and consumption. Consider that the US population has increased by 32% since 1990. So even if we managed to drop our per capita emissions by 32%, there'd have been exactly 0 improvement. And alongside population growth is also increased consumption and development driving ever greater emissions.
And we're in a country with a best case scenario since we have low fertility, people who care, lots of money and some of the highest [wikipedia.org] per capita emissions in in the world. Think about somewhere like India or Africa. India has about 1/8th our emissions, [Sub-Saharan] Africa about 1/20th. As these regions develop, it's basically impossible for their emissions to go anywhere but up. And the development of these regions will have a dramatic impact on our global emissions due to their population: about 1.4 billion in India, 1.1 billion in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is not a problem you're going to socially solve or even make significant inroads into.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Sunday June 27 2021, @05:56PM (3 children)
I'm sure you've seen it already, but I found this [soylentnews.org] too appropriate given our conversation here.
Scotland is now deploying a CO2 capture factory capable of capturing up to a megaton of CO2 per year. Assuming that's a success you're looking at 33k of these plants would make human CO2 emissions = 0.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 28 2021, @04:28AM (2 children)
One of the nicknames for Economics is "the dismal science". And I see that name not as a complaint of economics, but as yet another way of saying that people just don't want to accept limits. Unfortunately, you are probably correct in thinking that there's just not enough will to address Global Warming, and consequently, we will do far too little too late to save our current coasts. Say goodbye to the Greenland ice sheet, and New Orleans, Miami, Venice, Calcutta (Kolkata), and many of the other coastal cities of the world.
While that is the most likely scenario, we owe it to ourselves to still try to stop it from happening. And a very strong reason to give it our best shot is that rapid sea level rise is going to displace an awful, awful lot of people. How on Earth we're going to manage such massive migration without war is a real poser. I feel very unsure that peace can be kept. Then, if war does break out, can we restrain ourselves from using nuclear weapons? We should strive to avoid ever sliding into such an awful fix. That's the smart thing to do.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday June 28 2021, @01:09PM (1 child)
I'm not sure what you're talking about or if I'm missing some sort of irony or whatever? 33k of these plant and human emissions = 0. That's like about 900 plants per country if we only consider OECD countries
Unless this plant doesn't work, and there's no reason to think it won't - then that's it, this is all over. Not only will you be able to undo human emissions, you could even bring CO2 levels arbitrarily low (or high) as desired. It will lead to an awesome scenario where we can actually remove all concern whatsoever about CO2 emissions which will also enable the rest of the world to rapidly accelerate their development and for us to more fully utilize our natural resources.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 28 2021, @04:02PM
33k sounded like an awful lot of plants. I just assumed it would be impossible to build that many. Not really impossible, but politically impossible. Upon further thought, 33k spread out over the nearly 150M km^2 land area isn't all that much, really, just 1 plant per 4500 km^2, which is very roughly 1 plant per 2 or 3 counties. That may be the way forward.
Still, there's a lot to be said for other moves, such as transitioning our transportation from internal combustion engines to electric motors, apart from the reduction in CO2 emissions that will make possible. The issues with energy storage-- like that if the Li-ion battery is the best we can do, it will take an awful lot of lithium to have a massive fleet of electric cars powered by them-- can be worked out, I'm confident.
If you want a bit of irony, it's that these CO2 scrubbing plants are called "plants", and seems they weren't even trying for any correspondence in name with those natural CO2 scrubbers, plants, as in those green, leafy naturally growing things that cows eat.