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CO2 already emitted will warm Earth beyond climate targets, study finds
- Aachen 6y agoDo I understand the article correctly that this is talking about the long tail of warming, as the climate gets asymptotically closer to what it'll eventually settle on? Like when you have a fridge and turn the power off, it'll get slower and slower towards environmental temperature, and they calculated this trend for thousands of years given CO2e already emitted rather than in the next, say, 50 years? If yes, it sounds like something to keep in mind, i.e. it's not like we still have much of a CO2e budget remaining or time to waste (we'll have to take back out of the air what we put in from X years ago onwards), but at the same time it will also take many many years to get to dangerous warming levels (if we stopped emitting on an extremely optimistic schedule) and at some point between "in a while" and "in a few centuries" we have to suck those greenhouse gasses back out of the air to not have this effect run its full course. So this isn't "turns out we're doomed after all" as the headline suggests, just a further-into-the-future calculation that tells us what kinda already made sense (the long tail until settling on a new temperature average).
- chki 6y agoWith my layman understanding this is correct in principle but according to the linked paper in the article the climate target of 1.5 C will already be surpassed in the year 2100 – even without any further CO2 emissions. And yes, the tail effects of global warming beyond our usual time horizon of 2030/2050 were already known.
- loceng 6y agoI've thought the consensus among experts is that we'll have to not only stop pollution but also re-capture a lot of what we've already released?
- bognition 6y agoAnd recapture isn’t going to be easy. We’d have to figure out how to drive the global economy off of the recapture process
- Aachen 6y agoIf there are no significant emissions to tax, then fixing environmental damage done by past generations sounds like something for governments to pick up with public money. We also spend public money on forest management, wildlife bridges to create reasonably sized habitats, etc. It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time. For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
- imtringued 6y agoIt's easier to just drive the prices of CO2 certificates up. A EU CO2 certificate for 1 ton of CO2 costs 25€. If you buy it and resell it at a higher price like 100€ it's either too expensive and will never be bought or if it will be bought you will be economically harming CO2 emitting companies.
- Aachen 6y agoMy initial thought is that funding those participating in an ineffective scheme does not strike me as the most helpful option. But I really don't know enough about it to comment on whether that is the case here, or if it might indeed make sense for me to do this. Do you know of any research (doesn't have to be published, a blog post with a good analysis is just as helpful) that looked into whether this is a good idea?
- whatever1 6y agoYou really dont want to roll the dice about the new global climate equilibrium. It is a huge system that we barely understand, and currently we are moving the needle far away from the settled equilibrium. It is perfectly possible that once you reach a tipping point then things will accelerate very fast to the new equilibrium, giving us no time to react.
- ABCLAW 6y agoThe concern is that temperature response to emissions may look like other buffered chemical systems. See the PH curves here:https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/acidbaseeqia/phcurves.html https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/acidbaseeqia/phcurves.h... Basically we see plateaus where large increments of reagent do nothing, then a massive abrupt shift as the buffering potential of the system fails.
- andy_ppp 6y agoYes I really do think that makes a lot of sense, all that methane trapped in permafrost springs to mind. These scary once in a generation things do occasionally happen...
- 8note 6y agoAlso the ocean acidifying. It's been disolving a lot of CO2 for us, but at some point, it'll reach an equilibrium and our air concentration of CO2 will go up much faster
- AstralStorm 6y agoThat capacity is huge, but in the meantime, all fish will be choked by algae blooms.
- AngryData 6y agoIt is starting to happen now. Many ocean current turnovers rates are at or approaching the time since the start of the industrial revolution. Up until a few decades ago we kept getting clean water coming up from below with low concentrations of CO2. Now we are getting CO2 laden water that can't absorb nearly as much and what "fresh" water we got left coming to us isn't going to last much longer.
- ummonk 6y agoSort of, yeah, but note that the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is on the order of a couple centuries for scrubbing into the deep oceans (it gets scrubbed faster into other sinks such as the ocean surface, but those sinks also fill up). So any warming effect will only last centuries, not thousands of years.
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- jtdev 6y ago> “as the climate gets asymptotically closer to what it'll eventually settle on?” Earth’s climate has never and will never “eventually settle” regardless of the existence of humans.
- Aachen 6y agoI'm looking at a human scale, on the order of thousands of years at most (in 1000 years, I expect we'll be able to live on space ships for considerable amounts of time, perhaps even long enough to reach nearby stars before we need to resupply). Within a few thousand years, there are already cycles visible. If that's what you refer to, then I just mean to generalize that cycle to a new average. E.g. if we cycled between 19°C and 21°C every 11 years due to the solar cycle, then that would be shifted to 21-23°C instead. (I'm making these numbers up, they're just examples of what kind of effect I mean.) Beyond those thousands of years, even if we're considering the sustainability of our climate even if we had never discovered the use of fire in the first place, yeah there is no "eventually settle" of course. It will change depending on things like the sun burning out, asteroids hitting, other geological shifts, changes in who inhabits the world, etc. That seems beyond the scope of the discussion, we can't simply change that by changing our habits.
- newacct583 6y agoThe climate doesn't have an asymptote unless all the inputs are steady. If humanity were to disappear, the warming would continue for a while but then start to subside as the excess CO2 is absorbed in the oceans (absent things like feedback loops due to arctic methane, etc...). To be blunt: we've fucked it up already, and anything we do to "fix" world ecology at this stage is going to be characterized as something like terraforming. We aren't ever going back to "normal" in our lifetime or our grandkids'.
- Aachen 6y agoDon't you think we might have to terraform (to experiment with our only planet) a whole lot less if we manage to reduce, reuse, recycle instead of continue as we do? I agree that it seems likely that we'll have to do some sort of geo-engineering in the future. But if you mean that as an excuse to not even try and just let future generations undo everything with hopefully better tech and a world in chaos, then I vehemently disagree. I don't even have kids nor plan on ever having any, it's just immoral (and perhaps it's my way of finding purpose in life to help fix a problem humanity is facing).
- Melting_Harps 6y agoReposing from earlier Oligarchy post: At risk? It seems like they never looked at that Princeton study that stated it had already taken place in 2014 [0]. Personally speaking it took the 2008 crisis to finally force me to accept this truth, the US is a corpo-facist State with a very well traveled revolving door between politics and certain 'Private' Industries that benefit the most of from favourable policy and legislation as their lobbying budgets reflects that--banking, schooling, pharma/medical, and most blatant of all military contractors spanning everything from fastfood chains that supply on base meals, to mercenaries for hire (Blackwater/Xe) to weapons manufacturing (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ratheon et al). When you look back at how every crisis before and after 2008 was handled in just my lifetime, be it the opioid epidemic, dotcom bubble before that in the 2000s to the wallstreet corruption and Iran Contra and crack crisis in the 80s their is very little consequence for their corporate and political affiliates, where as entire generations of the populace are let to their own devices. I hate to to say this, as I wish we could just bypass it entirely already a logical decesion, but short of stopping the CCP expanding its far more dysfunctional form of tyrannical Imperialism (and disregard for the environment) acting as a deterrent in South Asia the US has no real function anymore in anything that matters, and we would benefit from hastening the transition from this pointless archaic and clearly Oligarchical nation state model as soon as possible to a Global confederation so we can start solving real issues on the Global level that demand all of our attention: specifically pertaining to climate change and the fallout from just that alone. It really fills me with dread that we can't figure this very obvious problem all while we are trying to tackle being a multi planetary species. Boeing just got hit with a $2.5B with a deferred prosecution fine and no criminal prosecutions mentioned for conspiracy of fraud when employees intentionally lied to the regulators. For any pleb or small business owner this is a sure way to get all your assets seized in a 'slam dunk' case ending in federal prison, but this is a MegaCorp with cronyist assurances from DoD and NASA contracts so expect more sweet heart contracts to come their way to recover far more than this in the near future. What a joke... 0:https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
- Lucasoato 6y ago
- dukeofdoom 6y agoenjoying a mild winter right now, no complaints
- dane-pgp 6y agoSitting in front of a fire can feel cosy, but being set on fire is generally unwelcome. Unfortunately Earth's climate is one of those complex systems where a single temperature in a single location at a specific time doesn't give much information about how desirable conditions will be for humanity generally in future years.
- codingprograms 6y agoEvery time I read these reports, six months later they find out the data was faked, emails are leaked with political agendas, etc. I straight don’t trust “science”. Don’t get me started on the replication crises. Or how many times climate predictions have been off by hundreds of percent I’m not an expert, but I have a dual masters in math and cs. If you listened to these people 30 years ago, you would expect we would all be engulfed in a fire ball by now. It hasn’t happened. Almost none of the past predictions have turned true. Ever. I’m not going to start now and these people need to be held accountable for studies that they did in the past that didn’t work Also, sorry for offending everyone’s ministry of science
- Aachen 6y agoDid you look at the paper? Is the data wrong? The calculations? Is there anything you can re-run with alternative data sources that you do trust? Or calculations you checked? Or do you "straight up" not trust people when the conclusion is not controversial enough (or some other random justification) without actually checking anything? At the very least, do you have any sort of data or analysis that backs up the claim that it's more likely than not that this will turn out to be faked data in 6 months, e.g. did a majority of climate-change-is-real papers go down that fate?
- jhardy54 6y agoIt's simple: they don't like the conclusions.
- Aachen 6y agoPerhaps, but perhaps they also just never stopped to question what their peers are saying about climate change.
- codingprograms 6y agoShow me any climate paper that actually predicted what it said would happen. It’s always some 20 years off doomsday. But the day never comes
- claydavisss 6y agoFor all of those who will come here to post outrage - rememer you helped make this happen too!
- Proven 6y agoSo far there's been no actionable negative impact from human-generated CO2 emissions. All warnings about catastrophic consequences have been laughably wrong. Joke material, really. Like that one about the earth becoming unlivable by 2020. Now I see the same predictions but for 2030, 2070, 2100 and whatever. So funny.
- rigger-word 6y agoboy you bidenniggers sure are starting early on this one
- King-Aaron 6y ago> "...it can be delayed for centuries if the world quickly stops emitting extra greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas" Yeah. I don't see that happening.
- refurb 6y agoMany people will interpret this as “too late, so why bother”.
- King-Aaron 6y agoCertainly not my intended interpretation, but it is a little pessimistic of me I agree.
- bootlooped 6y agoIt's the same pattern of reactions we see in the US with covid. It's not real. It's a hoax. Even if it's real, it's not nearly as bad as they say, and it'll cost too much and kill jobs. Even if it's as bad as they say, it's too late to do anything about it, we're powerless.
- 0-_-0 6y agoOh yes, the famous 4 stage strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak
- fastball 6y agoThis is why the solution is (and always has been): 1. Electrify everything. 2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later. 3. Carbon capture.
- ehsankia 6y ago> always been Well, not quite. If we had started back when climate change became clear mid-20th century, #3 wouldn't have been needed. But now, it is indeed the only option, and it will be very expensive. And the more we delay, the more expensive it'll become. We are basically screwing over future generations who will have to pay our debts.
- fastball 6y agoEh, carbon capture has always been a good idea to develop. Some things just make the most sense releasing greenhouse gases and will for the foreseeable future, e.g. CH4-powered rockets or CO2 released from cement. Will never be a problem if we're capturing as much as we emit.
- imtringued 6y agoCarbon capture works at a point site. Put your machine there and you get a nice concentration of CO2. Once it's in the atmosphere you are basically just building a more efficient tree. Any machines you build will have to be as large as forests. Who is going to pay for that? By definition this would be keynesian gold digging. Pay people to do something that has very little economic benefits for the individual doing it and it's not in competition with any other private industry. It's basically an extreme example of a luxury.
- agumonkey 6y agotechnological path stay behind political doors.. we need leaders
- gnulinux 6y ago
- DarkmSparks 6y agoSo no new ice age yet then? Great, keep up the good work.
- tengbretson 6y agoThis is concerning news.
- anonisko 6y agoIt's not really news if you've been paying attention the last few years or decades. Not enough people have been paying attention.
- Aunche 6y agoCurrently, the richest 10% are responsible for half of all CO2 emissions [1], and you only need $93k be in the richest 10% [2], quite modest by HN standards. Historically, the only way countries have been able to lift themselves out of poverty is by burning fossil fuels for energy. While alternative energy is rapidly advancing, Nigeria isn't going to wait decades to build a solar plant when they can build several coal power plants right now. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-of-global-carbon-emissions-says-oxfam https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/how-much-money-you-need-to-be-in-the-richest-10-percent-worldwide.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/how-much-money-you-need-to-b...
- tomjakubowski 6y agoAccording to the Oxfam report linked by that Gyardian article[1], the global top 1% (~ millionaires) produce 15% of emissions, "more than twice the poorest 50% (c.3.1 billion people), or more than the entire cumulative emissions of citizens in the EU." [1]: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621052/mb-confronting-carbon-inequality-210920-en.pdf https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
- born_a_skeptic 6y agoHonestly, after seeing how poorly scientists botched modeling covid-19 infection/death rates, I just get how it's possible to model something like this which is several decades in the future and have confidence in your prediction.
- orwin 6y agoI don't know, the IPCC 2005 models are really accurate (you have to take the "if nothing is done" line). But i guess 15 years is not enough for you. Well, it's simple. Look at BP scientist model in the late 70's and look how much we diverged. 40 years, if the model is false you will see it fast no? Since you're a skeptic, you have to follow the rule: look at the evidence that say you're wrong before looking at the evidence that say you're right. Luckily, those models can be the evidence of both at the same time, so you only have to do your own research twice!
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThey also delivered a vaccine in record time. Mean your alternative is what, pagan rituals and bloodletting?
- selimthegrim 6y agoQAnon Shaman seems to be a sign of an undiscovered market for those
- bennyelv 6y agoDid they botch them or did they make the best predictions possible with the information available at the time? What's the alternative, to only act when you have 100% certainty about anything? Would doing absolutely nothing between the beginning of 2020 and now have resulted in better or worse outcomes for Covid?
- tunesmith 6y agoI'm having a hard time nailing down the math. I know that the estimate is that we were at 280ppm pre-industrial, and that one recent reading was 412ppm. I think that corresponds to 2187 GTCO2 and 3217 GTCO2 respectively. But the IPCC - a while ago - said we had to stay below 2900 to have a 2/3 chance of remaining below 2 degrees. Another source says we're at 2300 anthropogenic GTCO2 now. How do I square that math? I know that there's a difference between "total" GTCO2 and anthropogenic GTCO2, and I also know that the planet absorbs about 55% of anthropogenic.
- saalweachter 6y agoDoes it work out if you account for the increased CO2 dissolved in the ocean?
- tunesmith 6y agoOh... I think I got it. 3217-2187 = 1030 anthropogenic in the atmosphere, and 55% will get reabsorbed, so that put us at the 2289 total that won't get reabsorbed. And since we emit 37.1 per year (figure probably out of date), and 45% of that sticks around, we have about 36 years before we go past 2900 (at this rate). Although I'm not sure if that reabsorption is already figured in to the 37.1 figure.
- tunesmith 6y agoTo clarify... 2289 is the amount anthropogenically emitted, before reabsorption (whatever the correct term is). 1030 is the amount left behind after reabsorption. The (probably out of date) IPCC guideline is to stay under 2900 emitted, and the 37.1 is how much is emitted per year, so those numbers don't have to take absorption into account. Therefore, the difference is 611, or about 16.5 years from whenever that measurement was taken. So, roughly - 2036. The world needs to be carbon neutral by 2036, according to that math. (And those numbers are behind the science in more recent articles, which are implying overshoot and that 2 degrees is inevitable.)
- watertom 6y agoSlowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions isn’t enough, we need to be net negative, but we don’t have the technology to capture and sequester 40 billion metrics tonnes of greenhouse gases per year, every year.
- AngryData 6y agoI would say we have the tech, we just don't have the political will to do so. We could have turned most of the world into using nuclear power if we wanted. We could have overbuilt nuclear to pay the energy costs required for mass carbon sequestering. We could still do it today. But not without the political will to fund massive energy projects that go beyond merely satiating our consumer demands.
- boyadjian 6y agoI’m really not surprised by this news : Unfortunately, global warming is consubstantial with human activity. In fact, the only thing that is ecological, is poverty. I'm not trolling, I'm serious : By the laws of physics, the richer you are, the more you consume, the more you pollute by producing CO2. All the people who tell you that you can keep the same GDP while producing less CO2 are wrong.
- imtringued 6y agoEmissions are going down in many countries and their GDP isn't shrinking. In fact, if you invested more in emission reductions you could probably increase GDP growth.
- enqk 6y agoIs that true? Is it still true if you take into account that the CO2 emissions are maybe emitted say in China, to produce the goods of those supposedly virtuous countries?
- posix_me_less 6y agoWestern countries transferred manufacturing to Asia.