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I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitig

I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life. "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

vvanders 9y ago
The Newsroom captured this pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI
pier25 9y ago
AFAIK the IPCC ignored most of the feedbacks in their last assessment. https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-assessment-report-will-ignore-crucial-permafrost-carbon-feedback-5d2289e9461d/ https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-a...
hood_syntax 9y ago
It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.
- lutorm 9y ago
  There isn't really a "worst" case here. We can always make it worser...
  - lisper 9y ago
    The destruction of civilization will probably cap our ability to do further significant damage. If not, then our extinction surely will.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Yes, that's the fundamental negative feedback on anthropogenic carbon emissions.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Nobody believes that global warming will cause the literal extinction of the human race. The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by a couple feet over the next 2 hundred years. That's the science. Doesn't sound like doomsday to me.
      - ForHackernews 9y ago
        http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
        tempestn 9y ago
        The first paragraph: > It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
        fencepost 9y ago
        The annotated version with links to source data is probably a better option to link. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
        stale2002 9y ago
        The guy is talking about 10 degrees C scenarios, aka scenarios that nobody believes is going to happen. The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century. When someone can rationally talk about what will happen in the IPCC predicted scenarios, which is the scientific consensus, then I will listen to them. If you are some crank, who is talking about 1000 parts per million of C02, and 10 degrees C temp increase by 2100, well then you shouldn't be taken seriously.
- 2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
  We need to invent fusion like yesterday and use that to power efforts to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    We can just use Fusion to drop a giant ice cube in the Arctic, just like in Futurama.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    I'm a big proponent of huge increases in funding for fusion research. But I think a better "extreme measures" project to mitigate global warming is the space sunshade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
    - simonh 9y ago
      The fusion Manhattan project? The problem with that is the Manhattan project scientists knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. With fusion research there are already dozens of active research efforts, but we have absolutely no idea if any of them will work, or if we need a new approach nobody has thought of. In this situation throwing money at the problem simply isn't the solution. Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
      - yongjik 9y ago
        I don't think scientists in the Manhattan project knew exactly how to do it. That's why they ended up having (at least) two totally different types of bombs, one with a Plutonium core using spherical implosion and another with a Uranium core using cannon-like ignition. Why try one scheme when you can try two at twice the price?
        simonh 9y ago
        But both worked fine. So yes, they really did know what they were doing. The reason to do two versions wasn't really in case one didn't work, they had very good reason to believe both would work. It was a matter of which would offer the best combination of efficient fission, weight, cost and reliability. We do not have two clearly viable different routes to practical fusion reactors. We don't even have one at this point.
candiodari 9y ago
It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere. Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all. > "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency. If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference. Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.
- cmurf 9y ago
  This is idiocy. You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement. Not merely they're mistaken, not merely they have imperfect data, but intentionally deceiving with malice. That's how many scientists and how much data there is contravening your first statement, not least of which is Exxon - that liberal bastion of environmental preservation.
  - topspin 9y ago
    "You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement" The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]: "Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere." and "Carbon dioxide comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources; natural sources are predominant." Your misunderstanding is apparently common enough that the last assertion is offered in the context of dispelling a myth. [1] https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon-storage-faqs/what-are-the-primary-sources-of-co2 https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...
    - cmurf 9y ago
      That page says: Myth: Carbon dioxide comes only from anthropogenic sources, especially from the burning of fossil fuels. Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier. The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels. Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I came to that realization after taking an environmental education class where they " left out the feedback loops". I disagree with your sentiment that they had to leave things like this out of the model. If it was left out it was probably not well understood. Its pretty easy to see that any form of mitigation is irrelevant until it becomes a real problem because getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society. Usually that only occurs when its pretty apparent that they have to do something to mitigate it.
- glitcher 9y ago
  > getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society Sadly true on so many levels.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  One of the major flaws of this species is that we don't do anything inconvenient, that requires global agreement, until it becomes literally an existential threat. And even then we may dither, and there will be special interests that will keep spreading out misinformation about it, etc. Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    > Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration. Compared to what? I think you should be happy with what you've got, because it's the best we've ever seen. I'm happier with a species that could burn out, than one that could do no wrong. If there was a problem, yo, we'll solve it.
    - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
      Compared to the freaking brink of annihilation that we walk to every time there's an opportunity to do so.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
kdoherty 9y ago
The phenomenon that is being described where melting ice causes the release of CO2 into the atmosphere seems to have been known to climate scientists, though I don't know whether it has been included in climate change models. There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/10154590312681372 https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268...) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the video, though I highly recommend watching the whole thing).
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  The trouser-soiling moment is when the methane clathrate ices start melting. They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly boned.
  - crush-n-spread 9y ago
    We need that global effort to happen yesterday. It's going to be much easier to get the carbon out of the atmosphere by leveraging the already-existing carbon cycle through accelerated silicate weathering than it will be to artificially reduce atmospheric temperatures once huge amounts of methane have been released from sea ice.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
    Doesn't methane break down in the atmosphere fairly rapidly? From what I'm reading, methane lasts about 12 years while CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for potentially thousands. Unless we choke to death on methane isn't this less of an issue than CO2 buildup?
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and the release would be absolutely huge. The momentary spike would well cause a lot of CO2 to be released.
jerf 9y ago
"I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life." If such feedback loops could be that dire and unavoidable, then they would already have happened direly and unavoidably. It has been this warm before, in the not-that-distant past by geological standards. If there's anything unusual about our current situation, it's the rate, not our current location. That does not mean that bad things or things we won't like can't happen, but we can't be sitting on a metaphorical bomb, or it would already have long since gone off.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Could it be as bad as the Permian extinction?
- lutorm 9y ago
  but we can't be sitting on "a bomb", or it would already have long since gone off. That's a strange argument given that previous variations in climate indeed were very severe...
- knieveltech 9y ago
  Evidence suggests they already have happened several times in earth's history. You might consider doing a little research into the relationship between climate shifts and mass extinction events.
- simonh 9y ago
  All things being equal yes, but they're not equal. The Holocene Climate Optimum is the nearest thing in the last few hundred thousand years and it wasn't anywhere near this warm globally. What it did do though is melt the Laurentide ice sheet, dramatically raising global sea levels. But the ice sheet protected the North American continental tundra. Nowadays there's no ice sheet there any more to absorb the heat and stop the tundra melting and releasing its CO2 and methane. Look up the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum though. That's the nearest equivalent episode to what's happening now.
lutorm 9y ago
IIRC they were not included in the IPCC reports, but for a different reason: even though pretty much everyone agrees that they exist, they were too difficult to quantify.
QAPereo 9y ago
I've been saying this in and offline for years... then I realized that it just doesn't matter... we're cooked. Things will be out of control before people eve understand what really happened, as in Egypt, Tunisia, etc.
mirimir 9y ago
Notwithstanding claims of deniers, climate scientists are generally conservative in their modeling.
devrandomguy 9y ago
There is one potential negative feedback loop that I am now curious about, since we recently learned that Antarctica is/was highly volcanic. If the continent deforms as the mass of ice melts off of it, causing the volcanoes go off in a mega-eruption, could the atmospheric particulates shade the Earth enough to trigger an ice-age in the near future, say, 50-100 years? And if so, could we conceivably modulate the level of the particulates in order to manage the ice age?
- simonh 9y ago
  I expect 100 years is way too short term. There's no way all that ice is going to melt that fast, the amounts of heat required would be staggering. The consequences of climate change are going to take many hundreds or thousands of years to play out.

vvanders 9y ago

The Newsroom captured this pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

pier25 9y ago

AFAIK the IPCC ignored most of the feedbacks in their last assessment. https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-assessment-report-will-ignore-crucial-permafrost-carbon-feedback-5d2289e9461d/ https://thinkprogress.org/ipccs-planned-obsolescence-fifth-a...

hood_syntax 9y ago

It's probably safer to assume that we're pretty much screwed at keeping the status quo and we need to start researching ways for humanity to survive the resulting changes. Of course, we should still keep ongoing efforts to curb and eventually eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases in effect, but we're past the point of pretending the worst case isn't possible.

lutorm 9y ago
There isn't really a "worst" case here. We can always make it worser...
- lisper 9y ago
  The destruction of civilization will probably cap our ability to do further significant damage. If not, then our extinction surely will.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Yes, that's the fundamental negative feedback on anthropogenic carbon emissions.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Nobody believes that global warming will cause the literal extinction of the human race. The scientific consensus is that sea levels will rise by a couple feet over the next 2 hundred years. That's the science. Doesn't sound like doomsday to me.
    - ForHackernews 9y ago
      http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
      - tempestn 9y ago
        The first paragraph: > It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
      - fencepost 9y ago
        The annotated version with links to source data is probably a better option to link. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
        stale2002 9y ago
        The guy is talking about 10 degrees C scenarios, aka scenarios that nobody believes is going to happen. The IPCC, which is the official authority on climate change, believes that there will be 2-3 degrees C increase in temperature over the next century. When someone can rationally talk about what will happen in the IPCC predicted scenarios, which is the scientific consensus, then I will listen to them. If you are some crank, who is talking about 1000 parts per million of C02, and 10 degrees C temp increase by 2100, well then you shouldn't be taken seriously.
2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
We need to invent fusion like yesterday and use that to power efforts to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  We can just use Fusion to drop a giant ice cube in the Arctic, just like in Futurama.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  I'm a big proponent of huge increases in funding for fusion research. But I think a better "extreme measures" project to mitigate global warming is the space sunshade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
  - simonh 9y ago
    The fusion Manhattan project? The problem with that is the Manhattan project scientists knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. With fusion research there are already dozens of active research efforts, but we have absolutely no idea if any of them will work, or if we need a new approach nobody has thought of. In this situation throwing money at the problem simply isn't the solution. Meanwhile new solar infrastructure projects are already cheaper than coal. This is a problem that technology is already solving for us.
    - yongjik 9y ago
      I don't think scientists in the Manhattan project knew exactly how to do it. That's why they ended up having (at least) two totally different types of bombs, one with a Plutonium core using spherical implosion and another with a Uranium core using cannon-like ignition. Why try one scheme when you can try two at twice the price?
      - simonh 9y ago
        But both worked fine. So yes, they really did know what they were doing. The reason to do two versions wasn't really in case one didn't work, they had very good reason to believe both would work. It was a matter of which would offer the best combination of efficient fission, weight, cost and reliability. We do not have two clearly viable different routes to practical fusion reactors. We don't even have one at this point.

candiodari 9y ago

It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere. Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all. > "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency. If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes some difference. Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.

cmurf 9y ago
This is idiocy. You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement. Not merely they're mistaken, not merely they have imperfect data, but intentionally deceiving with malice. That's how many scientists and how much data there is contravening your first statement, not least of which is Exxon - that liberal bastion of environmental preservation.
- topspin 9y ago
  "You basically have to believe tens of thousands of scientist are liars to accept the first statement" The first statement, that human industry is not "the main cause of co2 release," is undisputed fact. This is what the DOE says [1]: "Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere." and "Carbon dioxide comes from both natural and anthropogenic sources; natural sources are predominant." Your misunderstanding is apparently common enough that the last assertion is offered in the context of dispelling a myth. [1] https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon-storage-faqs/what-are-the-primary-sources-of-co2 https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/carbon...
  - cmurf 9y ago
    That page says: Myth: Carbon dioxide comes only from anthropogenic sources, especially from the burning of fossil fuels. Jesus is a myth. The above statement is not something any thinking person has ever considered. You'd have to be a moron to think CO2 only comes from human source. Of course CO2 predates mankind, as well as mandkind's activities. Positioning something that no one is claiming as if it's something someone is claiming and then knocking it down, is known as a strawman, it is not a myth. But this is what you'd expect from a DOE run by an oilman and climate change denier. The concern is not the source or reason for historic CO2 levels, it's the source and reason for increases above historic CO2 levels. Treating people as if they're too stupid to see through such transparent attempts at distraction should be a violation of the code of conduct, before name calling those who try to get away with shit like this.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I came to that realization after taking an environmental education class where they " left out the feedback loops". I disagree with your sentiment that they had to leave things like this out of the model. If it was left out it was probably not well understood. Its pretty easy to see that any form of mitigation is irrelevant until it becomes a real problem because getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society. Usually that only occurs when its pretty apparent that they have to do something to mitigate it.

glitcher 9y ago
> getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society Sadly true on so many levels.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
One of the major flaws of this species is that we don't do anything inconvenient, that requires global agreement, until it becomes literally an existential threat. And even then we may dither, and there will be special interests that will keep spreading out misinformation about it, etc. Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > Seriously, the "sapiens" part in the name of our species is a bit of an exaggeration. Compared to what? I think you should be happy with what you've got, because it's the best we've ever seen. I'm happier with a species that could burn out, than one that could do no wrong. If there was a problem, yo, we'll solve it.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    Compared to the freaking brink of annihilation that we walk to every time there's an opportunity to do so.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

kdoherty 9y ago

The phenomenon that is being described where melting ice causes the release of CO2 into the atmosphere seems to have been known to climate scientists, though I don't know whether it has been included in climate change models. There is a great talk (video online here: https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/10154590312681372 https://www.facebook.com/WoodsHoleOcean/videos/1015459031268...) by Richard Alley where exactly this phenomenon is mentioned (see Q&A at ~50:55 in the video, though I highly recommend watching the whole thing).

logfromblammo 9y ago
The trouser-soiling moment is when the methane clathrate ices start melting. They call that one the "Clathrate Gun" hypothesis, because you can't un-fire a gun. Once that trigger is pulled, no amount of anthropogenic CO2 emissions reductions will have any effect whatsoever. From then, it will take a positive, intentional, globally coordinated effort to reduce temperatures by other means, or we will be well and truly boned.
- crush-n-spread 9y ago
  We need that global effort to happen yesterday. It's going to be much easier to get the carbon out of the atmosphere by leveraging the already-existing carbon cycle through accelerated silicate weathering than it will be to artificially reduce atmospheric temperatures once huge amounts of methane have been released from sea ice.
- 2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
  Doesn't methane break down in the atmosphere fairly rapidly? From what I'm reading, methane lasts about 12 years while CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for potentially thousands. Unless we choke to death on methane isn't this less of an issue than CO2 buildup?
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and the release would be absolutely huge. The momentary spike would well cause a lot of CO2 to be released.

jerf 9y ago

"I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life." If such feedback loops could be that dire and unavoidable, then they would already have happened direly and unavoidably. It has been this warm before, in the not-that-distant past by geological standards. If there's anything unusual about our current situation, it's the rate, not our current location. That does not mean that bad things or things we won't like can't happen, but we can't be sitting on a metaphorical bomb, or it would already have long since gone off.

stcredzero 9y ago
Could it be as bad as the Permian extinction?
lutorm 9y ago
but we can't be sitting on "a bomb", or it would already have long since gone off. That's a strange argument given that previous variations in climate indeed were very severe...
knieveltech 9y ago
Evidence suggests they already have happened several times in earth's history. You might consider doing a little research into the relationship between climate shifts and mass extinction events.
simonh 9y ago
All things being equal yes, but they're not equal. The Holocene Climate Optimum is the nearest thing in the last few hundred thousand years and it wasn't anywhere near this warm globally. What it did do though is melt the Laurentide ice sheet, dramatically raising global sea levels. But the ice sheet protected the North American continental tundra. Nowadays there's no ice sheet there any more to absorb the heat and stop the tundra melting and releasing its CO2 and methane. Look up the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum though. That's the nearest equivalent episode to what's happening now.

lutorm 9y ago

IIRC they were not included in the IPCC reports, but for a different reason: even though pretty much everyone agrees that they exist, they were too difficult to quantify.

QAPereo 9y ago

I've been saying this in and offline for years... then I realized that it just doesn't matter... we're cooked. Things will be out of control before people eve understand what really happened, as in Egypt, Tunisia, etc.

mirimir 9y ago

Notwithstanding claims of deniers, climate scientists are generally conservative in their modeling.

devrandomguy 9y ago

There is one potential negative feedback loop that I am now curious about, since we recently learned that Antarctica is/was highly volcanic. If the continent deforms as the mass of ice melts off of it, causing the volcanoes go off in a mega-eruption, could the atmospheric particulates shade the Earth enough to trigger an ice-age in the near future, say, 50-100 years? And if so, could we conceivably modulate the level of the particulates in order to manage the ice age?

simonh 9y ago
I expect 100 years is way too short term. There's no way all that ice is going to melt that fast, the amounts of heat required would be staggering. The consequences of climate change are going to take many hundreds or thousands of years to play out.