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https://phys.org/news/2022-11-earth-temperature-millennia.html
The Earth's climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.
Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a "stabilizing feedback" mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.
Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is "silicate weathering"—a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.
Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth's carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide—and global temperatures—in check. But there's never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.
The new findings are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record changes in average global temperatures over the last 66 million years. The MIT team applied a mathematical analysis to see whether the data revealed any patterns characteristic of stabilizing phenomena that reined in global temperatures on a geologic timescale.
They found that indeed there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth's temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to act.
The results are the first to use actual data to confirm the existence of a stabilizing feedback, the mechanism of which is likely silicate weathering. This stabilizing feedback would explain how the Earth has remained habitable through dramatic climate events in the geologic past.
"On the one hand, it's good because we know that today's global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback," says Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). "But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues."
More information: Constantin Arnscheidt, Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different timescales, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adc9241
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday November 18 2022, @06:22PM (3 children)
I've always thought that way, but the problem is (for those who care anyway) the human suffering and loss in the meantime. I think it's a case of us being aware that we've been contributing, and as we (humans) have been doing, at least try to reduce our impact. As we build out carbon-free (or carbon neutral) infrastructure, the economies of scale should help accelerate our efforts. PV panels are much much less expensive than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, for example. I'm encouraged by the use of satellite data to find methane (natural gas) leaks, for instance.
An interesting website: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ [worldometers.info]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday November 18 2022, @06:40PM
BTW, it's interesting to look at the "Per capita" column. Canada is fairly high, but you might expect this with long cold winters.
I'm a huge fan of building insulation. I talked a friend into (and I helped) using spray polyisocynurate foam insulation when he was rehabbing his house. He has barely used his oil heat system in the past 10 years. In fact, it's been apart for years. He uses a high-efficiency wood pellet stove and his place is very warm. He's in the northern US and gets long cold winters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cykros on Saturday November 19 2022, @01:17PM (1 child)
I think the reason for much of the conflict is that "trying to reduce our impact in effective ways " and "politically expedient bullshit" are often quite confused. Especially with things like electric cars being charged on a coal fired infrastructure, turbines and solar panels whose manufacturing process produces about as much CO2 as the systems they're designed to replace, and other measures such as these that get touted by con men and women looking to get elected (so they can, no doubt, go on to promote warfare which generates a heck of a lot more carbon than anything they ever reduce). Or perhaps the ESG scores, which are gamed by companies such that those who actually many times produce MORE carbon can appear to have a higher score than smaller competitors, and dry up the investment dollars in their latest chosen method for maintaining their dominance.
I'm not a climate denier, but I am pretty prone to rolling my eyes any time it comes up in the sphere of politics. Not saying don't keep trying, but do take a moment to analyze what often amounts to empty virtue signaling.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 19 2022, @07:55PM
Is the "empty virtue signaling" you fret about any different from essentially unfettered propaganda by trillion dollar companies with a blatant profit-motive? Just so we know to set our outrage level appropriately for those dirty scumbag virtue signalers.