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Antarctic CO2 Hit 400 PPM for First Time in 4M Years
- lossolo 10y agoThe worst thing is that we can't stop it when it will be too late. This doesn't work like a switch. Even if we would drastically cut all CO2 emission those levels would not drop in our lifetimes.
- splawn 10y agoThat compounded with climate lag... scary stuff. http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-D...
- lkrubner 10y agoIndeed. The Earth is large and difficult to steer.
- mirimir 10y agoBut that is what's mind-boggling. That one species has managed such global impact.
- danieltillett 10y agoRelying on natural processes yes there is a problem, but if we were to put WWII levels of resources into it we could create artificial trees [1] while hiding under a short term SO2 umbrella [2]. Of course I doubt we will actually do this. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
- hyperbovine 10y agoI have no doubt at we will try this, plus a lot of even dumber ideas, once the shit really starts to hit the fan. The world is not going to just sit back as Manhattan, Mumbai, Shanghai, Sydney, Rio, etc. disappear under a foot or two of water. Politicians (the same one who spent 50 years failing on this issue) will demand action. It's the best argument I can think of for putting serious research effort into geoengineering, odious as it may be.
- danieltillett 10y agoArtificial trees are not considered geoengineering since they are just reversing the CO2 released. The really sad aspect is we are not putting in the R&D resources needed to develop them to the required scale. No matter what we do about preventing the release of more CO2, we need to deal with the CO2 that has already been released.
- tim333 10y agoRegular trees work quite well and are cheaper. You just have to harvest them and not burn the wood, or turn it to biochar.
- chris_va 10y agoActually burning the wood works just fine, provided you can sequester (see BECCS, along with recent developments in basalt based CCS).
- danieltillett 10y agoThere are not enough natural trees to do the job because we have taken most of the really productive land to grow food. While there is some potential to use biochar in some locations, it is not going to be enough to get the CO2 levels down at the pace we need.
- baddox 10y agoIt's probably a lot cheaper for those cities to build flood control systems.
- ageofwant 10y agoOf all these I believe ocean iron seeding to be the most interesting and viable. It may also improve fish stock and have other direct economic benefits. The negative knee-jerk reaction of my fellow Greens on this matter is is only topped by our anti-nuclear power rhetoric. Global adoption of LFTR reactors combined with the massive reduction in coal/oil power plants, ocean iron seeding and the adoption of electric vehicles should get global C02 levels close to pre-industrial levels within 200 years, if we start today.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago> Global adoption of LFTR reactors ... if we start today I'm a huge fan of gen IV reactors in general and LFTR in particular, but we are a long way from being able to deploy any MSRs, even if everyone woke up tomorrow and suddenly took the construction of LFTRs as a terminal moral value. All that have been created to date are small research reactors, mostly 40+ years ago. Almost all of the MSR research projects started recently have fizzled out; AFAIK the only project that has any kind of plan for future civilian nuclear energy is China's. The current regulatory and public opinion environment for civil reactors is absolutely abysmal, and that will likely take even longer to change than the research will.
- c0ur7n3y 10y agoHere's an excellent presentation about that from a psychology perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnEO2ysnO6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnEO2ysnO6Q Half of us are in denial, half of us are doing ineffective things, and half of us are in China.
- gwent 10y agoNote: I buy into global warming, but that video was terrible and only manages to worsen the case for global warming. He claims people are global warming deniers and uses ice cores to prove the case, only he's an idiot for not realizing that MOST of the people he's referring to are not denying that the earth is warming up, rather they're clearly saying that it is the impact/outcome where there is a disagreement. He consistently and unjustifiably uses answers for peripheral problems to debate core arguments which only destroys his credibility. I could only watch for so long... I just had to stop, it was hurting that much.
- agumonkey 10y agoThere is no pipeline flush in nature CPU.
- programminggeek 10y agoAssuming the fossil record and all of our measurements and assumptions about our measurements are correct. It's not like anyone was there, writing this stuff down at the time.
- spdy 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core Ice was there and recorded it :/
- Turing_Machine 10y agoThe oldest ice core mentioned in that article is about 400 thousand years old. How does that prove anything about 4 million years ago?
- eknkc 10y agoOh this is reassuring. If we can't find a post it documenting the co2 levels within that ice, we are fine I guess. Let me burn a tire to celebrate.
- yongjik 10y agoYour phrase reminds me of the last question featured in this gem: http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/sciencetest.asp http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/sciencetest.asp
- combatentropy 10y agoUp from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm. More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...
- tonysdg 10y agoNEW ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! YAY WE DID IT - wait a sec...
- wolfram74 10y agoNo no, that just won't do. Math and modeling doesn't allow us to draw conclusions about things we can't directly observe. Someone had to be there and directly count the co2 molecules with their own eyes or it doesn't count as evidence.
- maxxxxx 10y agoI actually was the same for the dinosaurs. Have you seen any and written it down?
- Turing_Machine 10y agoOkay, I'm all ears (or, technically, eyes, since I'm reading this). How does a 400,000 year old ice core show anything about conditions 4 million years ago? Please be specific.
- Turing_Machine 10y agoP.S. you can assume that I've taken differential equations and graduate-level courses in computer modeling and simulation, if that helps.
- chc 10y agoYou can edit your comments instead of replying to yourself over and over.
- Turing_Machine 10y agoNow I see mention of an 800,000 year old core in that article. That's still not 4 million, or anything like it.
- nkurz 10y agoI was initially dubious of the "4 million year" quote, but the quick searching I did doesn't turn up anything credible that would contradict it, and did turn up many estimates that concur. I don't know enough to evaluate his methods, but Mark Pagani at Yale seems to have published a number of papers that give estimates going back 40 million years: http://people.earth.yale.edu/cenozoic-evolution-carbon-dioxide http://people.earth.yale.edu/cenozoic-evolution-carbon-dioxi... And this paper 2005 paper by Dana Royer provides an overview of a few hundred estimates going back 500 million years: http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf
- jakeogh 10y agoNice visualization from NASA: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-1920-MASTER.mp4 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011700/a011719/11719-...
- tejaswiy 10y agoThat is fascinating - Any idea how this was made?
- jakeogh 10y agoIt's a simulation based on ground measurement. https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11719 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11719 Now we have: http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/ http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/ (2014)
- benjoffe 10y agoNot entirely sure, but could be using the data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite[0]. This satellite orbits the Earth on the order of ~16 times per day which would not be enough granularity for the smoothness of this video, so I assume it's been combined with other weather data and advanced modelling to provide the smooth interpolation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory
- mturmon 10y agoOCO blew up on launch, but OCO-2, its successor, has been producing data since 2014. This nature run was from 2006, which predates the OCO-2 era, and predates GOSAT, another CO2 satellite. It may overlap partly with SCIAMACHY, an ESA mission. But in summary, I don't think the video was heavily constrained by actual CO2 observations, which are done only at a small number of sites on the ground (TCCON or FTIR). The video was probably constructed based on models of plant respiration (which is observed, indirectly, by remote sensing), winds (ditto, of course), and ground emitters. OCO-2 has offered more significant constraints on global CO2, with a roughly 2km x 2km footprint (per pixel), 1ppm accuracy (in a ~400 ppm quantity), and global coverage every 16 days. There are some videos of observations (not models) at: http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/Videos/ http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/Videos/
- williesleg 10y agoSuch bullshit. Where were the measurements 4m years ago? Just guesstimates. Need to plant more trees.
- Fiahil 10y agoSo, when should we start our preparation for the apocalypse? 2020? 2025?
- Retric 10y agoNever. The issue with climate change is it's not going to harm wealthy people, so it's not a problem for them. In other words bad shit might happen to 75% of the worlds population, but so what. During the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported food. Think about that for a little bit. Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. Cormac O'Grada points out that, in Ireland before and after the famine, "Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a 'money crop' and not a 'food crop' and could not be interfered with."[80] Net result, 1 million people died. Yes, large numbers of people really are that evil.
- niftich 10y agoExcellent point. It will affect different places differently, and those with means to work around it will suffer less than those without. For example, Arctic shipping may become a year-round possibility, opening up the shortest routes between the east coast of Asia and either side of the northern Atlantic. Parts of Arctic countries may open up for intensive agriculture. Meanwhile, the Maldives will be underwater, desertification will claim certain glasslands... this stuff is complex.
- ageofwant 10y agoI did not know this. The middle part I mean.
- baddox 10y agoI'm not sure why that requires "large" numbers of people to be evil. I suppose it depends what you mean by "large."
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoClimate change is already harming wealthy people in the UK who bought nice houses on flood plains or near the Thames. It's no longer possible to buy insurance in some areas - the insurance companies are ahead of the game on modelling climate change impacts - and many people are trying to move away from those areas, with varying degrees of success. Parts of the country are literally becoming uninhabitable. I had to drive through a flash flood today, and it made me wonder just how much worse the weather can get. At some point in the next few decades we'll probably start having tropical hurricanes - which will be immense fun in a country that's completely unprepared for them. Also, London is a climate disaster waiting to happen. The Thames Barrier protects London from tidal flood water, but it won't do anything at all to prevent the kind of storms that hit France and Germany last week.
- mturmon 10y agoA companion piece about crossing the 400 ppm boundary, also from the southern hemisphere: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-soars-past-crucial-milestone http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/atmospheric-carbon-di...
- tim333 10y agoI wonder why it was at 400ppm 4m years ago. Presumably the Earth survived the last time.
- nxzero 10y agoQuestion is if humanity would have been able to survive for the duration of those 4m years; Earth surviving humanity to my knowledge has never been the issue.
- tim333 10y agoWell, our ancestors were around. It seems it was about 2C hotter from 10 to 4m years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg
- Daishiman 10y agoYes, but they were a couple million and most, and consuming orders of magnitude fewer resources than we are.
- caf 10y agoThey weren't humans, though: humans have only been around for about 0.2M years.
- yongjik 10y agoWe don't know what happened to our ancestors. Anything from environmental disasters to epidemics could have wiped out 95% of our ancestors at some time, and the only trace of that would be slightly lower fossil counts. In other words, "our ancestors survived" isn't really reassuring. There's a really wide gap between "Everybody's lives become seriously harder" and "Humanity goes extinct". After all, even WW2 only managed to kill ~3% of the human population. A completely survivable event.
- m_mueller 10y agoArguing about the past about whether we can survive in the future is a logical fallacy because we all experience the Anthropic principle [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- flockonus 10y agoA good and recent video explanation about Earth natural cycles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztninkgZ0ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztninkgZ0ws
- MikeHolman 10y agoI've been having a bit of an existential crisis about this recently. Is sustainability even possible anymore? We are obviously living beyond the capacity of the earth to cope right now. But is it even possible to sustain this many people (at current standards of living with foreseeable technology)?
- umanwizard 10y agoNah.
- lprubin 10y agoNot having kids may be one of the biggest forms of environmental activism.
- fratlas 10y agoThis. I had an argument with a friend because I said having more than 3 kids is selfish, and conversely, having fewer kids (or adopting) is selfless and should be praised. They retorted saying it should be part of an individual's freedom to have as many as they wish. I think after a few more generations we may be looking at a world wide child policy (similar to China).
- skrowl 10y agoWho was taking the CO2 measurements 4 million years ago?
- MagicWishMonkey 10y agoWe use core samples to measure historic levels - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_sample https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_sample
- honkhonkpants 10y agoJesus.
- cconroy 10y agoForgive my ignorance on this issue but Earth has various feedback mechanisms that forestalls CO2: getting absorbed back into rocks and consumption by flora. Is comparing CO2 levels to 4 mya disingenuous because that is just one variable we are isolating? Are we sure that rising CO2 is producing these effects attributed to climate change and not some complicated combination of factors that is evidenced by Earth history of rising temperature followed by cooling temperatures followed by...
- eru 10y agoUnderstanding the climate is hard. Scientists are working on exactly these kinds of problems.
- jfoutz 10y agoIt's just a statistic. There are lots you can look at. This one is interesting specifically because it hasn't happened in 4my. The earth will be fine, life will continue. The more specialized something is, the more it's at risk for exceeding tolerance. Costal housing is good example. It's built to withstand perhaps 100mph winds, beyond that roofs come off. The built in mitigation is pretty slow, so there will be perhaps a couple hundred years of rebuilding stuff. Sea walls, levees, more weather resistance.
- foxylad 10y agoYou are correct that we don't understand EXACTLY how this works. But we do have an increasingly good idea, and it is now very widely accepted that increasing CO2 levels are due to fossil fuels, and that they are going to make life for future generations miserable. And I don't mean a few beach-side swimming pools falling into the ocean miserable - I mean millions of people drowning in a storm surge in Bangladesh, and millions more starving to death in Africa miserable. So we can either hope that some mysterious feedback mechanism will appear that puts this all right, or we can figure out how to fix this. And we've actually done this before. In the 1980s, scientists started raising concerns that the ozone layer was being depleted, and an international response reduced our CFC use to levels where we are now seeing the ozone layer recovering. In my cynical moments, I do wonder if the difference between then and now is that the oil lobby is much more powerful than the refrigeration lobby, but actually I think the problem is that reducing CO2 is a much harder problem and so more people just bury their head in the sand. So you can choose - bury your head in the sand (that's really what dreaming of mysterious negative feedback mechanisms is), or get fixing. I have kids and would hope that their kids have as good a life as I do, so I'm fixing.
- frogpelt 10y agoWhat if we (humans) don't survive this? It won't really matter in the long run.
- ralfd 10y agoThe world was just fine 4 million years ago. An Ice age would be way more devastating.
- mikeash 10y agoOn a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. If you have a sufficiently long view, nothing matters. The universe will experience heat death in a mere 10^1000 years, a blip on the total timeline. I happen to care about humans, though. Most humans do.
- curiousgeorgio 10y agoGo ahead and call me all the usual names (I don't care), but I'm a skeptic of a few things - especially things like science that has strong political influences/biases/implications - and yes, sometimes even mainstream science. But no, I don't deny or ignore the apparent trends. That's why I also don't feel (as others have expressed here) any sense of grave alarmism or fear about the effects of warming. When climate-related deaths have steadily decreased in recent history[1], shouldn't we really be more concerned with adapting (or continuing to adapt) our own environments to deal with the earth's climate? That doesn't mean we shouldn't be environmentally conscious; just the opposite. We should be conscious of our environment, both in terms of what nature provides and in terms of how we adapt to it. Surely, very few people alive today would be suited to living in many populous places in the world without the protections afforded by human invention - today or pre-industrialization. Technological progress (much of which is a product of fossil fuels) has enabled us to live significantly longer lives, and fewer people are in climate-related danger now than ever before in history. In my view, that's a good thing. [1] http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uploads/boden.png http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uploads/...
- brc 10y agoRich countries with efficient and abundant energy have the lowest population growth rates and the cleanest and best preserved environments. The solution for environment degradation is the same as for poverty - the two are obviously linked. The solution is efficient energy and rejection of superstitious nonsense. Alas the majority of the world is trying to unwind the first and positively going the other way on the second.
- Oletros 10y ago> When climate-related deaths have steadily decreased in recent history[1] And exactly what does mean that figure from CATO Institute? > and fewer people are in climate-related danger now than ever before in history Do you have any link to back that claim?
- tr1ck5t3r 10y agoIts nice picking your time scales and models to convey a message as this image shows when CO2 was in the thousands parts per million. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Phaneroz... Now whilst its true the sun is heating up before it goes super nova millions of years in the future, which is what alot of the global warming fear is based on, and yes man has contributed a small % of CO2 by releasing CO2 from fossil fuels and cut down trees, the biggest threat facing mankind in the next 30 years is the Grand Solar Minimum. A Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) is where the sunspots in the 11 year solar cycle reduce in frequency and strength and extreme weather becomes common place. Sun spots reduce extreme weather events. The last GSM was seen during the Dalton Minimum and Maunder Minimum, which are now classed as mini ice ages. When this occurred we had things like increased volcanic activity which lead to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer but extreme cold weather with temperatures seen in the UK of -37 Degrees C, sea ports and the English channel freezing over, extreme winds which did things like blow copious amounts of sand inland, leading to houses being buried in places like Santon Downham, massive inland sand dunes which is what Thetford Forest is planeted on in a bid to return the soil back to some use, but most importantly estimates suggest around 25% of the global population died due to cold and famine due to crop failures. Today we have increased crop yields so whilst more land has been turned over to agriculture with modern farming practices, the risk is still very much a major threat in the next few decades as a hectare will feed more mouths today than it did during the medieval ice age and the global population has ballooned since the introduction of oil. There are steps you can take yourself though to reduce your risk, like buying suitable farm land whilst also investing in solar which can power air source heat pumps in case energy supplies & communication become disrupted due to extreme weather events. 1 Watt of solar power can provide upto 3 Watts of heat energy from air source heat pumps. These are just like air con units working in reverse. Now whilst no one wants to create a panic, looking at the facts in context is important and these points we need to bear in mind. Firstly there were no meteorological offices during the medieval ice ages, so the evidence amassed by Professor Brian Fagan which you can read about in his book "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850" explains how man was affected and were very likely the drivers of political events that led to the French Revolution, the Irish Potatoe famine and more. Its also worth pointing out that differences in the scientific community means no one really knows whether our manmade CO2 is going to benefit us or not when considering plants grow better with more CO2. So there you go, a brief introduction of what TPTB are currently capitalizing on, if you fancy capitalizing on it yourself in innovative ways yourself.
- rwhitman 10y agoSo my question is, what density of greenhouse gasses does it take to go from "Pliocene" to "Venus"?
- wallace_f 10y agoSometimes I feel I am the only one sceptical of the politics and alarmism surrounding climate change. I am Not saying I'm skeptical that it is real (or to be more appropriately scientific, that the evidence suggests the observed increase in CO2 and temperature most likely is caused by emissions), but I'm saying the politics are more complex than that. I can think of a number of other issues that pose similar if not more immediate, or greater risks to humanity that have lower economic costs to solve. Global warming activism also bothers me in some ways. Snobs have an absolute affinity for it, and it seems in this cause it's easy to create an aura of good will without actually having to follow-up and do anything tangible to benefit other people. Think: Buying hybrid cars that pollute more than my simple Honda. Preaching about the importance of action on this topic is also rather convenient: you don't appear to actually have to take any action. Preach about the problems of homelessness, drug abuse, crime, healthcare? There are obvious ways to actually spend your time helping people who are victims there. Want to hold the moral superiority card with as little effort as possible? It's super convenient. There's also the the west's party line to the rest of the world: We can afford clean energy now, and of course we want it; but even though other nations can't afford it, they're now declared immoral for not embracing it. None of what I'm saying is that global warming isn't a worthy cause, just that the enormity and alarmism of the politics that surrounds it is cause for question.
- aaronbrethorst 10y ago> I can think of a number of other issues that pose similar if not more immediate, or greater risks to humanity that have lower economic costs to solve. Cool, like what? > None of what I'm saying is that global warming isn't a worthy cause, just that the enormity and alarmism of the politics that surrounds it is cause for question. I agree. But that doesn't make it less of an issue. And cutting off your nose to spite your face doesn't seem like a useful solution, so what's the answer?
- whatshisface 10y ago>Cool, like what? Regular environmental damage, for one. We still have lots of forest-burning and toxic chemical exposure around the world. In fact, a major extinction is going on in the Amazon right now because of deforestation. We could also throw in public health crises like heart disease and diabetes - like climate, we may be able to improve those by changing our behavior. It is absolutely the case the case that present human and environmental health is under greatest assault by things other than climate. This is not to make climate less, but to point out that other problems loom a little larger than most people think.
- known 10y agoOPEC should sell its Oil in subsidized rates to countries that are reducing CO2 levels
- briandear 10y ago"Carbon pollution" -- would we ever claim that higher oxygen levels were "Oxygen pollution." Plant life thrives at higher CO2 levels, so calling it "pollution" is rather political.
- nradov 10y agoOf course we would claim that higher oxygen levels were pollution. Oxygen is a toxin, albeit a necessary one. If you breathe PPO2 > 0.5 atm for a few days it will wreck your lungs. And any increase in atmospheric oxygen would cause a proportional increase in fires.
- mikeash 10y agoWould you object if I filled your house with pure oxygen, or would you just allow it to happen?
- NietTim 10y agoWoah, so that's even higher when we had no summer in 1800 due to a volcanic eruption?
- digitalsushi 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
- ensiferum 10y agoI walk to work. Now are you part of the solution or part of the problem?
- effingwewt 10y agoYea, not everyone has that luxury. If you said something along the lines of "I've been contacting my state representative to push for more reform, donating to 'X' to aid in public awareness, etc", I would have given you the pat on the back you so obviously crave. And what about recycling, or purchasing avenues which ensure re-population? Plenty we can all do other than the current popular hipster "in" thing.
- Teever 10y agoIt is very astounding to hear someone describe walking to work as a luxury. I don't know what that says about our society.
- tr1ck5t3r 10y agoFor context, CO2 has been in the thousands parts per million in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxid... Sure the planet is warming up as the sun slowly goes super nova in millions of years time, but the biggest short term risk we face in the next 30 years which could last 500 years is the Grand Solar Minimum (GSM) A GSM is where sunspots drop off and the planet experiences extreme weather patterns which are now seeing now. To a limited degree we see this at the start and end of each 11 yr solar cycle anyway. This last occurred during the Dalton and Maunder minimum, when 25% of the planets population died due to famine and cold. It triggered political events like the French Revolution, the Irish Potatoe famine and more. In the UK temps as low as -37 Degrees C were seen, with sea ports frozen, the English Channel froze keeping ships locked in port or stuck out in open water. Extreme winds lead to massive inland sand dunes which is what Thetford Forest is now planted on in bid to return the soil slowly back to use, the village of Santon Downham had so much sand deposited on it that a few houses were buried. The forest was only planted in the early 1900's. To re-evalute the history of geo-political events during the medieval ice age and what you may have been taught in history, I would suggest reading the book by Professor Brian Fagan on the mini age, written in the 00's. Now whilst we had no meteorological offices during the medieval ice age, we can still get valuable insight by learning from history like what Professor Fagan has hilighted in his book, plus depending on what scientific models you listen to, we really dont know how the CO2 released by man from oil and cutting down trees is going to do. Plants grow better in CO2 as seen with dinosaurs and plants during the time when CO2 was in the thousands ppm so our actions may actually be a blessing in disguise, but bear in mind whilst we have higher crop yields today due to modern farming methods, the risk is now greater as one hectare of farm land now feeds more mouths today than ever before. With that in mind, you can take steps to minimise any impact on yourself, by taking up gardening, and investing in things like air source heat pumps with solar. 1 W of solar energy can create upto 3W of heat energy which is useful should you ever be cut off from the mains. Air source heat pumps are just over priced air con units working in reverse. By being forewarned is to be forearmed, so whilst the TPTB like to treat people like idiots because you then get dependent idiots, I feel its better to tell the truth so that people can think and innovate their way out of problems which you may be able to capitalise in lucrative ways.
- zaro 10y agoJust feels so relevant to the topic : http://img.pandawhale.com/post-17543-tomtoroyestheplanetgotdestroye-LjEH.jpeg http://img.pandawhale.com/post-17543-tomtoroyestheplanetgotd...
- FuNe 10y agoLet it roll. Few in the industrialized world if anyone really gives a shite (1). Lots of well-fed educated westerners would lose sleep if "free" economy is coughing but don't really care about this. Run away capitalism creating the problem in the first place is also -ehm- the reason why mostly leftists seem to get it. Not that this helps. It just makes the whole thing even more partizan. Sad truth is the guys that are really screwed (so far and at the foreseeable future) by this are not exactly HN commentators. To them this might mean drought and death next year but to us -fat cats- this apparently means a danger to economic development. We simply do not have our asses on the line (yet) - which is why we can talk this to death but do _nothing_ to really prevent it. We might wake up when we start losing relatives due to 50C heat waves. Who knows. And even then, if we get it, who would actually do something? We -at a global scale- have been terrible at resolving much simpler crises. Want an example? Ebola virus was stopped last minute. Zika virus is on the loose and is gonna get worse (because Olympic games will go on at the epicenter despite hundreds academics calling for delaying them). If nobody makes money out of it nobody cares. Our whole system is simply dancing to that music. So - let it roll babe. 1. <brutally honest mode on> Including my fat ass. </brutally honest mode>
- pmyjavec 10y agoGood comment! I'm highly surprised by the skepticism, especially by 'Hacker News' readers, some comments read as if science is but an inconvenience. Westerners don't live in complete isolation from the environment and other nations of the world. Our air comes from our oceans (which are in-trouble), cheap goods that prop up modern consumer driven economies (very sadly) come from places which are already being hit hard by warming temperatures, deforestation and drought and mass migration events are already taking place. More needs to be done.
- blondie9x 10y agoWe all know by now CO2 and CH4 leads to a warmer planet. We also know what's driving greenhouse gas levels to rise across Earth. Contributors are deforestation, intensive animal farming, and primarily the combustion of carbon fossil fuels like coal, tar sands, oil, natural gas etc. But here is the underlying problem, despite us knowing how bad things are, (97+% of scientists who study this field agree we are causing the planet's climate to shift away from the temperate climate we thrived in) not enough is being done at present to truly solve the problem. What really is disheartening and what no one in the media and government is talking about is how in 2015 CO2 levels rose by the largest amount in human recorded history. 3.05 PPM http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html We are being lied to and mislead by our governments that uniform actions are being performed to save the planet for the future of man. Vested interests in the fossil fuel industry continue to drive climate change. Yes, solar energy is starting to become incredibly efficient but not enough of it is coming online in proportion to fossil fuel burning that persists and is also installed annually. If we do not rally against it, our ability to live on this planet is at stake. The lives of our posterity are also at risk because of the burning. It will not be until we take extreme actions not on a country level but as humanity together that we will slow the burning and save ourselves. What are these actions you might ask that will actually be effective? These can range from banning fossil fuels entirely, global carbon pricing system, banning deforestation, changing human diets, extreme uniform investment in renewable energy and potentially fourth generation nuclear reactors, more funding for developing nations to install alternative energy sources, and to shift the transportation grid towards sustainability.
- lettergram 10y agoCO2 emissions have remained relatively constant from energy producing sources since the 90's in the U.S.[1]. Obviously, this is not the case for China and the alike. However, what we also don't consider is that cattle, swine, and most of all Humans digestion produce an exorbitant amount of those emissions. I just spend ~10 minutes searching and couldn't find a source regarding how much CO2 we as humans produce, but I would guess it's a lot more than other livestock. CO2 levels have less of an impact than other chemicals on the atmosphere[2]: > It (livestock) generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. [1]https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.ht... [2]http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772 http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772
- Shivetya 10y agoHigher CO2 levels will increase crop yields for many types of foods and in general flip back as the world greens to soak it up. While some will correctly identify deforestation, animal farming, and fossil fuel usage, most over look the costs in making concrete and the building boom as more of the world gets richer won't help that come down.
- dominiek 10y agohttp://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/denying-the-climate-catastrophe-1-introduction.html http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/denying-the-cl...
- Oletros 10y agoFrom the site: > The name change from "global warming" to "climate change" was, to my mind, less about science and more about a marketing effort to deal with the fact the temperatures had plateaued over the last 10-20 Someone that can say that the term have changed from global warming to climate change is because has an agenda because it is false.