8 ms·

Do 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 se

by Aachen 6y ago

Do 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 ago
With 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 ago
  I'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 ago
    And 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 ago
      If 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 ago
        It'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 ago
        My 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?
  - chki 6y ago
    I think the argument is that if we stopped all our CO2 emissions right now we would comply with the 1.5 C target in 2050 but would "only" break it in 2100. Since stopping all our emissions is not even close to what's happening (actually CO2 emissions are rising right now) that's not a viable model. So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first.
    - rgossiaux 6y ago
      >So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first. Maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't the necessary tech "planting trees"?
      - NineStarPoint 6y ago
        The main problem with trees is they’re very slow. It would take decades after we started planting billions of trees a year before they’d have grown to the extend where they’d have captured reasonable amounts of carbon. So, yes, it’s an option. But it’s a slow option we’d need to start implementing immediately if we wanted it bear fruit. (We produce enough CO2 that it takes 40 billion hardwood trees growing for 40 years to sequester as much CO2 as we make in a year. We’d have to plant a lot of trees, and then not touch them for years, to affect the course of things)
      - Thiez 6y ago
        A tree captures CO2 temporarily. We would have to bury the wood to actually remove it from the atmosphere.
        pmiller2 6y ago
        You are aware that "temporarily" in this context is the lifespan of a tree, right? Trees live anywhere from several decades to 20+ centuries, and their remains, once broken down, provide nutrients to the soil so more trees can grow.
        6y ago
whatever1 6y ago
You 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Yes 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 ago
      Also 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 ago
        That capacity is huge, but in the meantime, all fish will be choked by algae blooms.
      - AngryData 6y ago
        It 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 ago
Sort 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.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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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 ago
  I'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 ago
The 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 ago
  Don'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).

by Aachen 6y ago

chki 6y ago

With 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 ago
I'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 ago
  And 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 ago
    If 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 ago
      It'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 ago
        My 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?
- chki 6y ago
  I think the argument is that if we stopped all our CO2 emissions right now we would comply with the 1.5 C target in 2050 but would "only" break it in 2100. Since stopping all our emissions is not even close to what's happening (actually CO2 emissions are rising right now) that's not a viable model. So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first.
  - rgossiaux 6y ago
    >So we will probably need to recapture CO2 as well – or rather we will need to develop the necessary tech first. Maybe this is a stupid question, but isn't the necessary tech "planting trees"?
    - NineStarPoint 6y ago
      The main problem with trees is they’re very slow. It would take decades after we started planting billions of trees a year before they’d have grown to the extend where they’d have captured reasonable amounts of carbon. So, yes, it’s an option. But it’s a slow option we’d need to start implementing immediately if we wanted it bear fruit. (We produce enough CO2 that it takes 40 billion hardwood trees growing for 40 years to sequester as much CO2 as we make in a year. We’d have to plant a lot of trees, and then not touch them for years, to affect the course of things)
    - Thiez 6y ago
      A tree captures CO2 temporarily. We would have to bury the wood to actually remove it from the atmosphere.
      - pmiller2 6y ago
        You are aware that "temporarily" in this context is the lifespan of a tree, right? Trees live anywhere from several decades to 20+ centuries, and their remains, once broken down, provide nutrients to the soil so more trees can grow.
        6y ago

whatever1 6y ago

You 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Yes 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 ago
    Also 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 ago
      That capacity is huge, but in the meantime, all fish will be choked by algae blooms.
    - AngryData 6y ago
      It 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 ago

Sort 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.

deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

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 ago
I'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 ago

The 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 ago
Don'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).