11 ms·

These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. But wouldn't a hotter world tend to exacerbate emission trends,

These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. But wouldn't a hotter world tend to exacerbate emission trends, with human needs for AC and desalination rising, plus forest fires? Moreover, there might be some tipping point for large scale methane release. The 'tail risk' to global warming has appreciable density a long way out.

viach 10y ago
> These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. I think this is a very realistic assumption. Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890...
- Noseshine 10y ago
  I think you misread the comment you responded to (only the first sentence and then you assumed the rest?). He asked the opposite. The question asked about the other direction, up/more, not down/less. Goes to show we should hear one another out...
- oDot 10y ago
  Irreversible as in "won't fix itself" or in "don't even bother with CO2 extraction [edit: from the atmosphere]"?
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    The earth goes through cycles (to an extent), so I like to believe that if everyone died, given enough time, the earth would return to its former self. However, I could be wrong.
    - sevenless 10y ago
      It seems likely. 500 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than even the worst projections allow humans to create. CO2 eventually weathers into limestone and gets subducted under continental plates. Ultimately, geological activity renews the balance, and stops us turning into Venus.
      - sanxiyn 10y ago
        NPR article is "irreversible in 1000 years scale". Yes, things are different in million years scale. But even immeidately achieving zero emission today will not cool the planet, at least for 1000 years.
        jandrese 10y ago
        Basically it is irreversible on a human level timescale. Many generations of life on this planet are going to have to adjust to higher average temperatures. It's going to be (and already is really) a mini-extinction event. Unless we don't change course, then it might be a mass extinction.
        sevenless 10y ago
        There's the possibility of geo-engineering.
        jandrese 10y ago
        We can't even agree to stop causing damage. Agreeing to undertake a colossally expensive project to reverse the damage seems like a political impossibility. In 50 or a 100 years maybe, but not in the world as it is today.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    General information I've seen is thousands of years for the carbon cycle to return to its preindustrial balance.
  - sanxiyn 10y ago
    Actually, CO2 extraction from the atmosphere may work. But zero emission doesn't. Let me quote from IPCC AR5 SPM E.8 (Climate Change Commitment): "A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period. Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions." This is because most of additional energy (more than 90%) from CO2 forcing is stored in ocean. Oceanic thermal inertia is enough to keep warming in 1000 years scale without any additional CO2.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
I'm not sure. Many of the countries with the largest emissions per capita are in regions where houses are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Given that indoor temperature is ~ 20C, the ∆T for heating can be much greater than for cooling, since cold outdoor temp can easily go as low as -20C, while really hot weather won't go much above 40C. Thus, in a warmer climate where you need less heating in winter and more cooling in summer, you might actually end up using less total power for AC.
- throwanem 10y ago
  That assumes power consumption is constant for a given ∆T regardless of the method used to produce it, which seems optimistic.
  - sevenless 10y ago
    Yeah. I don't think thermodynamics works like that.
    - VLM 10y ago
      Shockingly that is pretty much how heat pumps work to a first degree (oh the pun), they don't much care which side is the evaporator and which side is the condenser. There are minor details in size of fan and design of coil vs tolerable noise level vs quality of insulation on connecting pipes. Also the pressure vs temp graphs are a little non-linear which does show up at the extremes (and the extremes are a small fraction of total operational time) In the west most cooling is done with a heat pump permanently wired into refrigeration mode aka a conventional air conditioner. There's a widely held belief that the entire system coefficient of performance is exactly 1 with somewhat less popular urban legends claiming a small fraction of 1 or only analyzing 100% efficient theoretical gas table cycles of 30 or whatever. However real world deployed average systems including air handler (aka fan) power and a realistic depreciation or embedded energy of manufacture etc results in about 3. So in the real world the total cost to the environment is about a kilowatt/hr to move about 3 kilowatt/hr of heat out of a building. It scales better than linear with size, something to do with moving air being expensive and larger AC being connected to larger buildings having a better surface area to volume ratio. Anyway for better or worse a kilowatt into an electric heater costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and generates about 1 KW of heating in a typical building, whereas a kilowatt into an AC or heat pump costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and moves about 3 KW of heat out of the building. In practice it takes less energy to cool than to heat although in theory a heat pump has difficulty telling the difference between 90F outdoor and 50F outdoor temps.
staticelf 10y ago
Well the trend has so far been that countries increase their emissions generally and not the reverse. Especially with emerging economies like China and India. A lot of Swedish politicians claims that Sweden has lowered it's emissions and while that is true we also outsourced a lot of production and increased our consumption rendering our emissions actually higher when you count that in.
- jandrese 10y ago
  This is a big concern of mine. One of the grand results of local environmental regulation plus globalization has been to export pollution from first world nations to third world nations. Pollution (at least Carbon pollution) is a global issue, and tackling it only at the local level has proven to be ineffective. It's a shame that it is politically impossible for the UN to make its own version of the EPA--complete with an enforcement arm that has teeth. Without it dirty manufacturers simply go where the pollution laws are least stringent (or at least poorly enforced) and continue to kill us all slowly.
madaxe_again 10y ago
Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. So yet more air conditioning will ensue, consuming more energy, warming oceans further, raising humidity, and thus exacerbating the problem. Positive feedback cycles sure are great. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
- ythl 10y ago
  Well if you don't believe in God, you might want to start since it appears he's the only hope we have left for a doomed climate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Another unmentioned consequence of rising CO2 levels is the lost productivity and quality of life that will accompany that. Consider the levels of CO2 rising from ~280 in the pre-industrial era to maybe ~700 by 2100. A 420 CO2 PPM outdoors also increases by at least that amount the air indoors, which leads to much higher CO2 concentrations, which are uncomfortable for people to breath in. I notice fatigue, grogginess and reduced cognition at levels above 1500 PPM, which are quite often reached in poorly ventilated offices and bedrooms. So levels that might be okay right now at ~1200 won't be okay by the end of the century. This is assuming a constant CO2 rise for the next 85 years at 3 PPM/year, which is quite optimistic. Depending on how bad the positive feedback cycles are, the rise might be much higher and will result in very poor indoor air quality for most people.
- flukus 10y ago
  > Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.
Pitarou 10y ago
If there's a methane tipping point, we may have already passed it. Have a look on YouTube, and you'll see people in Siberia happily creating fireballs by poking a stick in the ground and holding a lighter over the hole they've just created. And more methane is bubbling up from the Arctic continental shelf every year.
- imtringued 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI
dredmorbius 10y ago
We've known the basic climate math since the 1960s. The first political attempts to reach global agreements on emissions controls were in the early 1970s. 45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on_the_Human_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on... I'm not particularly sanguine. There are many books and authors on this topic. For the energy angle, I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil. For the political dynamics, William Ophuls is among the best I've read. His 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is a brief, but commanding overview of the problems and dynamics. It's long ago enough that many of its predictions are testable. While pessimistic on population and food, much the rest has held up, and Ophuls' predictions specifically on China and the former Soviet Union are uncannily accurate. He's written more since, with what he says is his final book being published in 2012. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-prologue-to-a-political-theory-of-the-steady-state/oclc/2524932&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc... http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the-age-of-ecology/oclc/753684198&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the... http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language/oclc/854845095&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language...

viach 10y ago

> These maps are based on emission trends continuing, assuming no political action will be taken. I think this is a very realistic assumption. Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890...

Noseshine 10y ago
I think you misread the comment you responded to (only the first sentence and then you assumed the rest?). He asked the opposite. The question asked about the other direction, up/more, not down/less. Goes to show we should hear one another out...
oDot 10y ago
Irreversible as in "won't fix itself" or in "don't even bother with CO2 extraction [edit: from the atmosphere]"?
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  The earth goes through cycles (to an extent), so I like to believe that if everyone died, given enough time, the earth would return to its former self. However, I could be wrong.
  - sevenless 10y ago
    It seems likely. 500 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was hundreds of times higher than even the worst projections allow humans to create. CO2 eventually weathers into limestone and gets subducted under continental plates. Ultimately, geological activity renews the balance, and stops us turning into Venus.
    - sanxiyn 10y ago
      NPR article is "irreversible in 1000 years scale". Yes, things are different in million years scale. But even immeidately achieving zero emission today will not cool the planet, at least for 1000 years.
      - jandrese 10y ago
        Basically it is irreversible on a human level timescale. Many generations of life on this planet are going to have to adjust to higher average temperatures. It's going to be (and already is really) a mini-extinction event. Unless we don't change course, then it might be a mass extinction.
        sevenless 10y ago
        There's the possibility of geo-engineering.
        jandrese 10y ago
        We can't even agree to stop causing damage. Agreeing to undertake a colossally expensive project to reverse the damage seems like a political impossibility. In 50 or a 100 years maybe, but not in the world as it is today.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  General information I've seen is thousands of years for the carbon cycle to return to its preindustrial balance.
- sanxiyn 10y ago
  Actually, CO2 extraction from the atmosphere may work. But zero emission doesn't. Let me quote from IPCC AR5 SPM E.8 (Climate Change Commitment): "A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period. Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions." This is because most of additional energy (more than 90%) from CO2 forcing is stored in ocean. Oceanic thermal inertia is enough to keep warming in 1000 years scale without any additional CO2.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

I'm not sure. Many of the countries with the largest emissions per capita are in regions where houses are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Given that indoor temperature is ~ 20C, the ∆T for heating can be much greater than for cooling, since cold outdoor temp can easily go as low as -20C, while really hot weather won't go much above 40C. Thus, in a warmer climate where you need less heating in winter and more cooling in summer, you might actually end up using less total power for AC.

throwanem 10y ago
That assumes power consumption is constant for a given ∆T regardless of the method used to produce it, which seems optimistic.
- sevenless 10y ago
  Yeah. I don't think thermodynamics works like that.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Shockingly that is pretty much how heat pumps work to a first degree (oh the pun), they don't much care which side is the evaporator and which side is the condenser. There are minor details in size of fan and design of coil vs tolerable noise level vs quality of insulation on connecting pipes. Also the pressure vs temp graphs are a little non-linear which does show up at the extremes (and the extremes are a small fraction of total operational time) In the west most cooling is done with a heat pump permanently wired into refrigeration mode aka a conventional air conditioner. There's a widely held belief that the entire system coefficient of performance is exactly 1 with somewhat less popular urban legends claiming a small fraction of 1 or only analyzing 100% efficient theoretical gas table cycles of 30 or whatever. However real world deployed average systems including air handler (aka fan) power and a realistic depreciation or embedded energy of manufacture etc results in about 3. So in the real world the total cost to the environment is about a kilowatt/hr to move about 3 kilowatt/hr of heat out of a building. It scales better than linear with size, something to do with moving air being expensive and larger AC being connected to larger buildings having a better surface area to volume ratio. Anyway for better or worse a kilowatt into an electric heater costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and generates about 1 KW of heating in a typical building, whereas a kilowatt into an AC or heat pump costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and moves about 3 KW of heat out of the building. In practice it takes less energy to cool than to heat although in theory a heat pump has difficulty telling the difference between 90F outdoor and 50F outdoor temps.

staticelf 10y ago

Well the trend has so far been that countries increase their emissions generally and not the reverse. Especially with emerging economies like China and India. A lot of Swedish politicians claims that Sweden has lowered it's emissions and while that is true we also outsourced a lot of production and increased our consumption rendering our emissions actually higher when you count that in.

jandrese 10y ago
This is a big concern of mine. One of the grand results of local environmental regulation plus globalization has been to export pollution from first world nations to third world nations. Pollution (at least Carbon pollution) is a global issue, and tackling it only at the local level has proven to be ineffective. It's a shame that it is politically impossible for the UN to make its own version of the EPA--complete with an enforcement arm that has teeth. Without it dirty manufacturers simply go where the pollution laws are least stringent (or at least poorly enforced) and continue to kill us all slowly.

madaxe_again 10y ago

Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. So yet more air conditioning will ensue, consuming more energy, warming oceans further, raising humidity, and thus exacerbating the problem. Positive feedback cycles sure are great. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

ythl 10y ago
Well if you don't believe in God, you might want to start since it appears he's the only hope we have left for a doomed climate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
antisthenes 10y ago
Another unmentioned consequence of rising CO2 levels is the lost productivity and quality of life that will accompany that. Consider the levels of CO2 rising from ~280 in the pre-industrial era to maybe ~700 by 2100. A 420 CO2 PPM outdoors also increases by at least that amount the air indoors, which leads to much higher CO2 concentrations, which are uncomfortable for people to breath in. I notice fatigue, grogginess and reduced cognition at levels above 1500 PPM, which are quite often reached in poorly ventilated offices and bedrooms. So levels that might be okay right now at ~1200 won't be okay by the end of the century. This is assuming a constant CO2 rise for the next 85 years at 3 PPM/year, which is quite optimistic. Depending on how bad the positive feedback cycles are, the rise might be much higher and will result in very poor indoor air quality for most people.
flukus 10y ago
> Not only this, but as the article touches upon, it may end up being lethal to go outdoors. At over 35C/95F with humidity of 100%, humans and other animals cannot cool themselves, even naked, in a breeze, in the shade, and die of heat exhaustion. There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.

Pitarou 10y ago

If there's a methane tipping point, we may have already passed it. Have a look on YouTube, and you'll see people in Siberia happily creating fireballs by poking a stick in the ground and holding a lighter over the hole they've just created. And more methane is bubbling up from the Arctic continental shelf every year.

imtringued 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI

dredmorbius 10y ago

We've known the basic climate math since the 1960s. The first political attempts to reach global agreements on emissions controls were in the early 1970s. 45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on_the_Human_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on... I'm not particularly sanguine. There are many books and authors on this topic. For the energy angle, I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil. For the political dynamics, William Ophuls is among the best I've read. His 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is a brief, but commanding overview of the problems and dynamics. It's long ago enough that many of its predictions are testable. While pessimistic on population and food, much the rest has held up, and Ophuls' predictions specifically on China and the former Soviet Union are uncannily accurate. He's written more since, with what he says is his final book being published in 2012. http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-prologue-to-a-political-theory-of-the-steady-state/oclc/2524932&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc... http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the-age-of-ecology/oclc/753684198&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the... http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language/oclc/854845095&referer=brief_results http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language...