6 ms·

A positive feedback loop through methane was always the nightmare scenario, and now it seems to be happening. It's probably too late to stop catastrophic warmi

A positive feedback loop through methane was always the nightmare scenario, and now it seems to be happening. It's probably too late to stop catastrophic warming simply by cutting emissions. We still need to do so, because it can always get worse, but it's time to look seriously at terraforming as well.

ejolto 9y ago
Do you mean terraforming Earth or Mars? Handling global warming will probably be easier than terraforming Mars.
- leot 9y ago
  easier scientifically != easier politically
- jackmott 9y ago
  just need to drop a few hundred thousand comets and asteroids and mars, and mar's moon, then float a few hundred thousand giant mirrors around it to warm it up a bit, seed it with plants, wait a few thousand years. no big deal!
  - lprubin 9y ago
    Don't forget solving the gravity disparity problem.
    - jackmott 9y ago
      dumping the comets and moons onto the surface is to help with that. But I've done some napkin math and it looks like we need ~40 billion commets to bring it halfway to earth mass...welp
      - goatlover 9y ago
        Makes terraforming Venus look easy.
      - ejolto 9y ago
        If you crash the entire asteroid belt into Mars, its mass will increase by half a percent.
        jackmott 9y ago
        a good start! you can get most of that half of a percent with just the 4 largest asteroids. maybe we need to sacrifice our own moon.
        ejolto 9y ago
        If we are moving the moon, we might as well just move the earth to a higher orbit further from the sun.
        AstralStorm 9y ago
        If we had access to this kind of energy, we'd be generating and treating copious amounts of antimatter and using it to power electrical CO2 sequestration devices.
    - Reason077 9y ago
      Mars gravity, 38% of Earth's, doesn't seem like all that much of problem. Sure, there are some health risks associated with being in a low gravity environment. But considering humans survive surprisingly well in micro-gravity in space, I'm sure we can adapt to the relatively strong gravity on Mars.
      - jsjohnst 9y ago
        > But considering humans survive surprisingly well in micro-gravity in space Source for that claim? The number of studies I’ve read (as well as conversations I’ve had with astronauts) about the health impact on astronauts who’ve been on the ISS for extended periods seems to disagree.
        CyberDildonics 9y ago
        Is less gravity the only difference in being on earth and being on the ISS?
        jsjohnst 9y ago
        Google would've easily found a bunch of supporting articles to what I stated, but here: https://www.space.com/23017-weightlessness.html https://www.space.com/23017-weightlessness.html https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast02aug_1 https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a... http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/20/health/your-body-in-space/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/20/health/your-body-in-space/inde... https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#Weightlessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h... tl;dr version: > In space, without gravity, bones lose more than 1% of minerals and density per month. > Astronauts also experience blood volume loss, weakened immune systems and cardiovascular deconditioning since floating takes little effort and the heart doesn't have to work as hard to pump blood through your body > "It changes their visual acuity," Charles said. "They're not able to see things up close. It's like advanced aging. That sort of thing happens at a sort of an accelerated rate."
- goatlover 9y ago
  Adapting to and/or fixing Earth's climate is easier than terraforming Mars by an enormous amount. Mars is more inhospitable to life than the center of Antarctica during the winter. Also, it's months away in a spaceship. There's no scenario in which Mars is a viable alternative for the human race this century.
- Filligree 9y ago
  Earth. It's the same technology set, more or less, but aimed at cooling it down rather than heating up Mars. I suppose the best option would be carbon capture, if it isn't too expensive, but I rather suspect it would be.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    It is not too expensive if we were to use nuclear reactors to power it. (Yes, including hiked commissioning and decommissioning costs.) Combined with solar and wind for peak of course because why not. There are currently no other options. Renewables alone are not enough to even power civilization at current level. (They get somewhere shy of 60% in an impossible best case.)
Roodgorf 9y ago
Some sort of carbon capture and storage situation seems more likely at this point, though I haven't yet seen any proposals that I think would get the backing they need to be effective. Is this what you meant by terraforming, or something else entirely?
- chewbacha 9y ago
  How about we grow corn (or other fast growing biomass like kelp) and bury it?
  - thinkling 9y ago
    I believe decaying plant matter generally emits green house gasses. (See for example emissions from biomass collecting behind dams; there were headlines about this in the past year.) So you'd have to bury the biomass to prevent rot and/or gas leaks. That means digging big holes and/or transporting biomass to the holes and/or fabricating/moving material to cover the biomass. All that work uses energy and thus produces GHG. It's probably hard to come out ahead.
    - chewbacha 9y ago
      The carbon it emits comes from carbon fixation from photosynthesis. So long as some carbon is sequestered in the soil, it’s net negative.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    it still decays to things that release that CO2, plus burying things uses a lot of energy. If this a serious proposal you should be thinking grow it, wait for it to dry out and burn it - the fire will not be hot enough to turn all the carbon into CO2, the remainder is elemental carbon (read charcoal) in a form not usable to life. That carbon is also biochar which is actually useful to improve the soil. This is most easily done in forest, but note that you need regular forest fires, otherwise the fire is hot enough to run all the carbon into CO2 and we didn't gain anything. Thus most of the forest fires you read about are bad - but if we change our policy after the fire and burn those forests often we can make them a net negative CO2.
duozerk 9y ago
And there are many, many such feedback loops, and not all of them linked to methane. For example, as the climate warms there are more and more wildfires, and those emits tons of carbon as well. Another example is the decrease in CO2 absoption by water as its temperature increases. There are tons of them that have not been modelled (if they even have been envisaged / discovered); mostly because they are very hard to estimate when it comes to their impact. As for your suggestion, I doubt this is even possible; we released millions of year worth of concentrated solar energy in the span of a century (edit: slightly misleading statement, see below). Scrubbing so much carbon from the atmosphere would take huge amounts of energy, and that energy needs to be clean or you're just adding to the issue. And all this needs to be done in a capitalistic system without any direct profit motive - good luck with that. The most "realistic" examples of geoengineering I have read about usually have downsides that end up killing most of us as well (such as a solar shield at L1 to decrease warming - the impact on plant life and as a result, food, would be pretty bad). Meanwhile we're still pretending less than 2C is possible, and even pretending that 2C is survivable as-is without profound changes to our way of lives. That being said, they mention that human CO2 emission have plateau-ed; I'm far from sure that this the case as a lot of it comes from self reporting and those numbers are likely heavily under reported (especially - but not only - from China). It should also be mentioned a lot of this could come from El Nino; but then again climate change is expected to impact that cycle and we may get stronger and/or longer El Nino periods - it may be partly consequence as well.
- titzer 9y ago
  > we released millions of year of concentrated solar energy This seems like an overestimate of how much energy it would take to do capture and sequestration. The energy density of fossil fuels is nowhere near that high. A gallon of gasoline is ~33kwh of energy, which is about the same amount of energy that falls on a square meter of Earth's surface in about 22 hours. In terms of barrels of oil, with global consumption at 96 million barrels per day, assuming 12hrs of sunlight a day, I calculated 8600km^2 of Earth's surface, or a square about 93km on a side.
  - mikeash 9y ago
nabla9 9y ago
>but it's time to look seriously at terraforming as well. There are so many orders of magnitude differences between the two problems (budget, timescales and difficulty) that I'm not sure if this is sarcasm.

ejolto 9y ago

Do you mean terraforming Earth or Mars? Handling global warming will probably be easier than terraforming Mars.

leot 9y ago
easier scientifically != easier politically
jackmott 9y ago
just need to drop a few hundred thousand comets and asteroids and mars, and mar's moon, then float a few hundred thousand giant mirrors around it to warm it up a bit, seed it with plants, wait a few thousand years. no big deal!
- lprubin 9y ago
  Don't forget solving the gravity disparity problem.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    dumping the comets and moons onto the surface is to help with that. But I've done some napkin math and it looks like we need ~40 billion commets to bring it halfway to earth mass...welp
    - goatlover 9y ago
      Makes terraforming Venus look easy.
    - ejolto 9y ago
      If you crash the entire asteroid belt into Mars, its mass will increase by half a percent.
      - jackmott 9y ago
        a good start! you can get most of that half of a percent with just the 4 largest asteroids. maybe we need to sacrifice our own moon.
        ejolto 9y ago
        If we are moving the moon, we might as well just move the earth to a higher orbit further from the sun.
        AstralStorm 9y ago
        If we had access to this kind of energy, we'd be generating and treating copious amounts of antimatter and using it to power electrical CO2 sequestration devices.
  - Reason077 9y ago
    Mars gravity, 38% of Earth's, doesn't seem like all that much of problem. Sure, there are some health risks associated with being in a low gravity environment. But considering humans survive surprisingly well in micro-gravity in space, I'm sure we can adapt to the relatively strong gravity on Mars.
    - jsjohnst 9y ago
      > But considering humans survive surprisingly well in micro-gravity in space Source for that claim? The number of studies I’ve read (as well as conversations I’ve had with astronauts) about the health impact on astronauts who’ve been on the ISS for extended periods seems to disagree.
      - CyberDildonics 9y ago
        Is less gravity the only difference in being on earth and being on the ISS?
        jsjohnst 9y ago
        Google would've easily found a bunch of supporting articles to what I stated, but here: https://www.space.com/23017-weightlessness.html https://www.space.com/23017-weightlessness.html https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast02aug_1 https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a... http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/20/health/your-body-in-space/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/20/health/your-body-in-space/inde... https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#Weightlessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h... tl;dr version: > In space, without gravity, bones lose more than 1% of minerals and density per month. > Astronauts also experience blood volume loss, weakened immune systems and cardiovascular deconditioning since floating takes little effort and the heart doesn't have to work as hard to pump blood through your body > "It changes their visual acuity," Charles said. "They're not able to see things up close. It's like advanced aging. That sort of thing happens at a sort of an accelerated rate."
goatlover 9y ago
Adapting to and/or fixing Earth's climate is easier than terraforming Mars by an enormous amount. Mars is more inhospitable to life than the center of Antarctica during the winter. Also, it's months away in a spaceship. There's no scenario in which Mars is a viable alternative for the human race this century.
Filligree 9y ago
Earth. It's the same technology set, more or less, but aimed at cooling it down rather than heating up Mars. I suppose the best option would be carbon capture, if it isn't too expensive, but I rather suspect it would be.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  It is not too expensive if we were to use nuclear reactors to power it. (Yes, including hiked commissioning and decommissioning costs.) Combined with solar and wind for peak of course because why not. There are currently no other options. Renewables alone are not enough to even power civilization at current level. (They get somewhere shy of 60% in an impossible best case.)

Roodgorf 9y ago

Some sort of carbon capture and storage situation seems more likely at this point, though I haven't yet seen any proposals that I think would get the backing they need to be effective. Is this what you meant by terraforming, or something else entirely?

chewbacha 9y ago
How about we grow corn (or other fast growing biomass like kelp) and bury it?
- thinkling 9y ago
  I believe decaying plant matter generally emits green house gasses. (See for example emissions from biomass collecting behind dams; there were headlines about this in the past year.) So you'd have to bury the biomass to prevent rot and/or gas leaks. That means digging big holes and/or transporting biomass to the holes and/or fabricating/moving material to cover the biomass. All that work uses energy and thus produces GHG. It's probably hard to come out ahead.
  - chewbacha 9y ago
    The carbon it emits comes from carbon fixation from photosynthesis. So long as some carbon is sequestered in the soil, it’s net negative.
- bluGill 9y ago
  it still decays to things that release that CO2, plus burying things uses a lot of energy. If this a serious proposal you should be thinking grow it, wait for it to dry out and burn it - the fire will not be hot enough to turn all the carbon into CO2, the remainder is elemental carbon (read charcoal) in a form not usable to life. That carbon is also biochar which is actually useful to improve the soil. This is most easily done in forest, but note that you need regular forest fires, otherwise the fire is hot enough to run all the carbon into CO2 and we didn't gain anything. Thus most of the forest fires you read about are bad - but if we change our policy after the fire and burn those forests often we can make them a net negative CO2.

duozerk 9y ago

And there are many, many such feedback loops, and not all of them linked to methane. For example, as the climate warms there are more and more wildfires, and those emits tons of carbon as well. Another example is the decrease in CO2 absoption by water as its temperature increases. There are tons of them that have not been modelled (if they even have been envisaged / discovered); mostly because they are very hard to estimate when it comes to their impact. As for your suggestion, I doubt this is even possible; we released millions of year worth of concentrated solar energy in the span of a century (edit: slightly misleading statement, see below). Scrubbing so much carbon from the atmosphere would take huge amounts of energy, and that energy needs to be clean or you're just adding to the issue. And all this needs to be done in a capitalistic system without any direct profit motive - good luck with that. The most "realistic" examples of geoengineering I have read about usually have downsides that end up killing most of us as well (such as a solar shield at L1 to decrease warming - the impact on plant life and as a result, food, would be pretty bad). Meanwhile we're still pretending less than 2C is possible, and even pretending that 2C is survivable as-is without profound changes to our way of lives. That being said, they mention that human CO2 emission have plateau-ed; I'm far from sure that this the case as a lot of it comes from self reporting and those numbers are likely heavily under reported (especially - but not only - from China). It should also be mentioned a lot of this could come from El Nino; but then again climate change is expected to impact that cycle and we may get stronger and/or longer El Nino periods - it may be partly consequence as well.

titzer 9y ago
> we released millions of year of concentrated solar energy This seems like an overestimate of how much energy it would take to do capture and sequestration. The energy density of fossil fuels is nowhere near that high. A gallon of gasoline is ~33kwh of energy, which is about the same amount of energy that falls on a square meter of Earth's surface in about 22 hours. In terms of barrels of oil, with global consumption at 96 million barrels per day, assuming 12hrs of sunlight a day, I calculated 8600km^2 of Earth's surface, or a square about 93km on a side.
- mikeash 9y ago

nabla9 9y ago

>but it's time to look seriously at terraforming as well. There are so many orders of magnitude differences between the two problems (budget, timescales and difficulty) that I'm not sure if this is sarcasm.