9 ms·

Reporting on the State of the Climate in 2018

108 points by infodocket 7y ago

DataGata 7y ago
One of the surprising facts in the article is this: >Global fire activity was lowest on record. The author explain why this is true a few sentences later- the change is being >driven primarily by the conversion of frequently burning savannas to agricultural areas. I wonder if this is one of those "humans accidentally geoengineering a few more years of habitability into the planet" things, like the global chilling effect that our pollutants have when they're highly reflective of light. Only, in this case, by preventing fires we're keeping more carbon locked into plants. (This is obviously a gross simplification, but this could be a possibility, right?)
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Holy crap, no. They are tilling over carbon sinks (grasslands) and ruining them. I don't know that we know enough about soil biota (and the impact of the various agricultural products that typically come along with this conversion) to know how long, assuming it is even possible, to reestablish them. It's horrible news.
- hwillis 7y ago
  > Only, in this case, by preventing fires we're keeping more carbon locked into plants. Completely backwards. For example see slash-and-burn farming[1], where fields are intentionally burnt to return carbon to the soil. Plants, on their own, are not great at carbon capture. They grow and die and the carbon they captured gets re-released. To be a truly effective carbon sink you should ideally be converting plant matter into a stable form, like peat- peat takes centuries to form, but locks carbon into the ground. Rainforests also create very carbon-rich sediments. Grasslands aren't the greatest, but when they burn they don't convert 100% into CO2 and lots of carbon is left in the soil. Farmlands on the other hand are scrupulous about harvesting all their plants and growing plants that don't leave behind much. They grow plants that are mostly fruiting body, and then the parts humans don't eat are fed to livestock, and it all gets turned with very high efficiency into CO2 and methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas (until if eventually breaks down into CO2). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn
HerrBertling 7y ago
Does anyone think we can solve this? Or is all hope gone? By now I’m at a point where I try to come up with a good explanation for my daughter once she’s old enough about how/why we all didn’t give a shit about climate change “back then”
- alfromspace 7y ago
  I doubt we'll keep on trucking with the status quo until the planet is uninhabitable, but there will be pain.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  > Does anyone think we can solve this? Or is all hope gone? Yes and yes. I see it as a manner of, even if "all hope is gone," we can still make it much, much, worse.
  - lisper 7y ago
    I see it as: we can still fix this (or at least mitigate it), but we will (almost certainly) choose not to.
- methehack 7y ago
  I've scaled back my expectations. By now, I'm shooting for laws and books. I think the question is not so much about whether the human race will survive (though surely it will be smaller in number) but whether it will be recognizable at all (aka "civilized").
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Oh boy, alarmism at its finest. Crop yields are up anywhere from 50-100%. Livestock numbers are stable. Food supply is more than secure. Sea level rise, is fairly minimal at 3mm a year. Certainly not cause for doom and gloom. Certainly manageable. Basic needs of humanity are: food, water, and shelter. None of which is in danger or even remotely close to danger levels. The idea that the human race is any remote kind of danger is bogus.
LastZactionHero 7y ago
I'm genuinely happy to see this depressing information on a .gov domain. I'd assumed the official federal government climate policy is 'Hoax, everything's fine.' Were the folks at NOAA allowed to publish this? Did they have to clear it by someone? Did anyone get fired?
- floki999 7y ago
  If I recall well, Trump immediately undermined this report. 'cause he knows best.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- pastor_elm 7y ago
  there was a good The Daily[0] on how the current administration plans to weaken this (mandatory) report. IIRC, for instance, projections are most dire after a certain timeframe (like 40 years). Subsequent reports just won't include those timeframes anymore. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/podcasts/the-daily/trump-climate-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...]
jasonless 7y ago
I read a report that wasn't sponsored by the gov. It suggested most of our fears of climate changes are null. Mainly it suggested our current velocity of technology advancement can propel us off of planet earth. I guess it's suggesting as the climate heat increases its marginal bc we can simply leave the planet and go to another. If we look at the work elon musk this isn't too far away - the article claimed. I'll try to find the URL. So I guess everything will be ok.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  That doesn't work on first principles with the ballistic equation with the current population. Just go to http://what-if.xkcd.com http://what-if.xkcd.com and do some of the type of back of envelope math of the energy requirements. He might actually have that specific example debunked on one of them. No technological development will change the shape of Earth's gravity well or e=mc^2. edit: https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/
- jniedrauer 7y ago
  Yes, great solution to the problem. Let the fate of the human race rest on a single billionaire's personal project. Let's also not consider the fact that there is no physical way to shuttle humans off of planet earth fast enough to even keep up with reproduction rates.
- sachdevap 7y ago
  Edited for politeness: This comment make no sense to me. Earth is the only planet we have for the foreseeable future (a couple of centuries at least).
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread still worse. That helps nothing. Instead, you can flag egregious comments, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
tunesmith 7y ago
I've been trying like the dickens to get a solid understanding of the numbers behind this, but they all seem to vary so much depending on source. A recent climate report indicated that as of 2011, the earth's atmosphere has somewhere around 1900 gigatons of CO2 and that we'd need to stay below 2900 gigatons to stay below 2 degrees celsius of warming. But other sources report carbon in terms of ppm, and this source says the world is at 407.4 ppm. One source I found says that 1 ppm = 7.81 gigatons of CO2, but that would mean we're at 3181.8 gigatons of CO2 worldwide, which is much higher than any other estimate I've seen - another estimate I saw said that the world is slated to go above 2900 gigatons in the year 2036 if current emission rates hold steady, but this one says we're already far over that. Is there a source somewhere that tracks the latest state of the basic math? Math that there is some general consensus on, based off of emissions of CO2 per country per year, emissions of CO2 of the world per year, ppm, gigatons, and the generally-agreed-upon correlation between that and degrees of warming? Because all these reports seem to disagree with each other. (What's nice about having an upper limit like 2900, and a rate of emissions per country, is that you can then calculate how much carbon each citizen needs to offset and/or sequester.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- skybrian 7y ago
  I don't know much about it, but I believe ppm is what instruments measure, and how that translates to temperature rise is going to depend on the climate model? You might have better luck looking for what climate models predict. It's not going to be basic math since climate is complicated. Maybe there is a toy model based on linear effects, but that's going to be a crude summary at best.
  - tunesmith 7y ago
    I'm fine with there just being a recognized source with wide consensus that says "we have to stay below x ppm/GTCO2 to stay below 2 degrees, and y to stay below 1.5, and currently we are at z." And, data on emissions rate, but those appear to be more consistent. From that you can calculate how much time we have. But so far it appears that our "scientific consensus" on those numbers range between "we have fifty years" to "we're already past that point".
khawkins 7y ago
The "highlights" section is very fishy to include in a scientific report. It's very easy to misinterpret trends when you cherry-pick extrema out of data affected by cyclical trends and stochastic processes with relatively high variance. Further, saying that some place is reporting a 100-year high record temperature sounds bad, but saying that the temperature was briefly about as high as it was in the 1910s sounds like nothing to worry about. Tony Heller has provided quite a bit of insightful context to climate reporting which likes to highlight extremes and gloss over important contextual data. https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1/videos?view=0&sort=...
- hwillis 7y ago
  Yeah, Tony Heller- the guy who believes methane isn't a greenhouse gas and cherry picks for cherry picking. What a quack

108 points by infodocket 7y ago

One of the surprising facts in the article is this: >Global fire activity was lowest on record. The author explain why this is true a few sentences later- the change is being >driven primarily by the conversion of frequently burning savannas to agricultural areas. I wonder if this is one of those "humans accidentally geoengineering a few more years of habitability into the planet" things, like the global chilling effect that our pollutants have when they're highly reflective of light. Only, in this case, by preventing fires we're keeping more carbon locked into plants. (This is obviously a gross simplification, but this could be a possibility, right?)

throwaway5752 7y ago
Holy crap, no. They are tilling over carbon sinks (grasslands) and ruining them. I don't know that we know enough about soil biota (and the impact of the various agricultural products that typically come along with this conversion) to know how long, assuming it is even possible, to reestablish them. It's horrible news.
hwillis 7y ago
> Only, in this case, by preventing fires we're keeping more carbon locked into plants. Completely backwards. For example see slash-and-burn farming[1], where fields are intentionally burnt to return carbon to the soil. Plants, on their own, are not great at carbon capture. They grow and die and the carbon they captured gets re-released. To be a truly effective carbon sink you should ideally be converting plant matter into a stable form, like peat- peat takes centuries to form, but locks carbon into the ground. Rainforests also create very carbon-rich sediments. Grasslands aren't the greatest, but when they burn they don't convert 100% into CO2 and lots of carbon is left in the soil. Farmlands on the other hand are scrupulous about harvesting all their plants and growing plants that don't leave behind much. They grow plants that are mostly fruiting body, and then the parts humans don't eat are fed to livestock, and it all gets turned with very high efficiency into CO2 and methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas (until if eventually breaks down into CO2). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn

HerrBertling 7y ago

Does anyone think we can solve this? Or is all hope gone? By now I’m at a point where I try to come up with a good explanation for my daughter once she’s old enough about how/why we all didn’t give a shit about climate change “back then”

alfromspace 7y ago
I doubt we'll keep on trucking with the status quo until the planet is uninhabitable, but there will be pain.
gwbas1c 7y ago
> Does anyone think we can solve this? Or is all hope gone? Yes and yes. I see it as a manner of, even if "all hope is gone," we can still make it much, much, worse.
- lisper 7y ago
  I see it as: we can still fix this (or at least mitigate it), but we will (almost certainly) choose not to.
methehack 7y ago
I've scaled back my expectations. By now, I'm shooting for laws and books. I think the question is not so much about whether the human race will survive (though surely it will be smaller in number) but whether it will be recognizable at all (aka "civilized").
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Oh boy, alarmism at its finest. Crop yields are up anywhere from 50-100%. Livestock numbers are stable. Food supply is more than secure. Sea level rise, is fairly minimal at 3mm a year. Certainly not cause for doom and gloom. Certainly manageable. Basic needs of humanity are: food, water, and shelter. None of which is in danger or even remotely close to danger levels. The idea that the human race is any remote kind of danger is bogus.

LastZactionHero 7y ago

I'm genuinely happy to see this depressing information on a .gov domain. I'd assumed the official federal government climate policy is 'Hoax, everything's fine.' Were the folks at NOAA allowed to publish this? Did they have to clear it by someone? Did anyone get fired?

floki999 7y ago
If I recall well, Trump immediately undermined this report. 'cause he knows best.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
pastor_elm 7y ago
there was a good The Daily[0] on how the current administration plans to weaken this (mandatory) report. IIRC, for instance, projections are most dire after a certain timeframe (like 40 years). Subsequent reports just won't include those timeframes anymore. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/podcasts/the-daily/trump-climate-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...]

jasonless 7y ago

I read a report that wasn't sponsored by the gov. It suggested most of our fears of climate changes are null. Mainly it suggested our current velocity of technology advancement can propel us off of planet earth. I guess it's suggesting as the climate heat increases its marginal bc we can simply leave the planet and go to another. If we look at the work elon musk this isn't too far away - the article claimed. I'll try to find the URL. So I guess everything will be ok.

throwaway5752 7y ago
That doesn't work on first principles with the ballistic equation with the current population. Just go to http://what-if.xkcd.com http://what-if.xkcd.com and do some of the type of back of envelope math of the energy requirements. He might actually have that specific example debunked on one of them. No technological development will change the shape of Earth's gravity well or e=mc^2. edit: https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/
jniedrauer 7y ago
Yes, great solution to the problem. Let the fate of the human race rest on a single billionaire's personal project. Let's also not consider the fact that there is no physical way to shuttle humans off of planet earth fast enough to even keep up with reproduction rates.
sachdevap 7y ago
Edited for politeness: This comment make no sense to me. Earth is the only planet we have for the foreseeable future (a couple of centuries at least).
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread still worse. That helps nothing. Instead, you can flag egregious comments, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

tunesmith 7y ago

I've been trying like the dickens to get a solid understanding of the numbers behind this, but they all seem to vary so much depending on source. A recent climate report indicated that as of 2011, the earth's atmosphere has somewhere around 1900 gigatons of CO2 and that we'd need to stay below 2900 gigatons to stay below 2 degrees celsius of warming. But other sources report carbon in terms of ppm, and this source says the world is at 407.4 ppm. One source I found says that 1 ppm = 7.81 gigatons of CO2, but that would mean we're at 3181.8 gigatons of CO2 worldwide, which is much higher than any other estimate I've seen - another estimate I saw said that the world is slated to go above 2900 gigatons in the year 2036 if current emission rates hold steady, but this one says we're already far over that. Is there a source somewhere that tracks the latest state of the basic math? Math that there is some general consensus on, based off of emissions of CO2 per country per year, emissions of CO2 of the world per year, ppm, gigatons, and the generally-agreed-upon correlation between that and degrees of warming? Because all these reports seem to disagree with each other. (What's nice about having an upper limit like 2900, and a rate of emissions per country, is that you can then calculate how much carbon each citizen needs to offset and/or sequester.)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 7y ago
I don't know much about it, but I believe ppm is what instruments measure, and how that translates to temperature rise is going to depend on the climate model? You might have better luck looking for what climate models predict. It's not going to be basic math since climate is complicated. Maybe there is a toy model based on linear effects, but that's going to be a crude summary at best.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  I'm fine with there just being a recognized source with wide consensus that says "we have to stay below x ppm/GTCO2 to stay below 2 degrees, and y to stay below 1.5, and currently we are at z." And, data on emissions rate, but those appear to be more consistent. From that you can calculate how much time we have. But so far it appears that our "scientific consensus" on those numbers range between "we have fifty years" to "we're already past that point".

khawkins 7y ago

The "highlights" section is very fishy to include in a scientific report. It's very easy to misinterpret trends when you cherry-pick extrema out of data affected by cyclical trends and stochastic processes with relatively high variance. Further, saying that some place is reporting a 100-year high record temperature sounds bad, but saying that the temperature was briefly about as high as it was in the 1910s sounds like nothing to worry about. Tony Heller has provided quite a bit of insightful context to climate reporting which likes to highlight extremes and gloss over important contextual data. https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1/videos?view=0&sort=p&flow=grid https://www.youtube.com/user/TonyHeller1/videos?view=0&sort=...

hwillis 7y ago
Yeah, Tony Heller- the guy who believes methane isn't a greenhouse gas and cherry picks for cherry picking. What a quack