6 ms·

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 n

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.
- bboylen 6y ago
  Wow I never thought of it this way. Scary stuff
neom 6y ago
Yes, this indeed. Especially given the positive feedback loops: https://climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-feedback-loops-are-making-climate-crisis-worse https://climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-feedback-loops-ar...
Aachen 6y ago
Yeah it's a tricky thing to write about concisely. On the one hand I wanted to add nuance to the alarmist headline, on the other (of course) I 100% agree with "let's not fuck around with the entire planet with tricky to predict effects like gulf stream etc." I'm the kind of person that annoys all the Germans by driving 95km/h on highways because it cuts fuel emissions nearly in half compared to the recommended speed of 130km/h. We don't even pay for fuel, that's paid by my SO's employer, it's purely because it adds like 10% of time on most trips (those 2-3 minutes are negligible) and allows me to visit family without feeling as bad about individual transport (public transport isn't really an option here for trips further than the next city over, extremely poor connections even by German standards). Or wear extra clothing and put a blanket over my legs while working and see how low we can put the heater. Or not heat the bedroom at all during fall/spring and take a hot water bottle up to get warm under the blanket (must be way more efficient than heating the whole room up). In short, yep I'm with you on not gambling on these estimates. But I'm also for nuance and being realistic lest someone claims that "ökos" / climate weirdos hugely exaggerated again and it's all not so bad. I find it tricky.
- pas 6y ago
  Or go faster and plant trees. If you pay for it that helps tree planting economies of scale. (Reforestation, not just monoculture.) I tried to do the same thing. Yes, individual actions have CO2e costs. It's not you, nor me, nor all of HN together that even can do anything impactful. Setting an example at best. (But then simply presenting a united coherent "yes carbon tax, yes ASAP, yes 125 USD/t" to everybody we discuss this with would probably help more.) That said, irrational alarmism is its own kind of hell.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    Planting trees, carbon capture, etc. is NOT "going faster". It's definitely good if you can do it supplementary, if you have money to burn after funding things that will help reduce emissions (roof insulation, double windows, replace car with electric car, add rooftop solar, fund a solar park or wind turbine nearby, etc.), but in virtually all cases it's much more expensive than reducing emissions and helping others do the same. We need to explore how to live sustainably rather than hope everyone will pay for their share of carbon capture (in the form of trees or whatever) while "the others" fix the underlying problem. We'd need an absolutely humongous number of trees or capture plants to retrieve today's emissions. That said, I was actually just writing about the topic of planting trees :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156 > 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. I do need to sleep still tonight (0230 here) so I won't now type out (on mobile) the reasons I don't think trees are a reliable option. And by tomorrow it won't matter anymore, nobody will read it (I don't like the ephemerality of HN/reddit threads.) So these are my 2ct, hope I could clarify my reasoning as I will go sleep now.
loopz 6y ago
On the grander scale, there's no equilibrium.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  That's about ad ussefull as "everyone dies eventually, so why worry about murder?"
  - loopz 6y ago
    Just that outside this one we don't know of any new equilibrium, the assumption in parent post.
beervirus 6y ago
We barely understand it, but yet we’re confident in the dozens of computer models of it that climatologists use that give varying results?
- 8note 6y ago
  So far those models have been way too optimistic about things not being as bad, so my current priors would expect things to be worse than models say
  - beervirus 6y ago
    That’s a funny way of saying “I trust them because they were wrong.”
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Except they don't give varying results. 10/14 models with published surface temperature predictions since the 1970s were statistically indistinguishable from reality: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-cli...
- imtringued 6y ago
  It only takes a glance at CO2 levels. You don't even have to predict anything to know that things are going to end badly.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    You don't have to predict anything to predict what's going to happen?

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.
bboylen 6y ago
Wow I never thought of it this way. Scary stuff

neom 6y ago

Yes, this indeed. Especially given the positive feedback loops: https://climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-feedback-loops-are-making-climate-crisis-worse https://climaterealityproject.org/blog/how-feedback-loops-ar...

Aachen 6y ago

Yeah it's a tricky thing to write about concisely. On the one hand I wanted to add nuance to the alarmist headline, on the other (of course) I 100% agree with "let's not fuck around with the entire planet with tricky to predict effects like gulf stream etc." I'm the kind of person that annoys all the Germans by driving 95km/h on highways because it cuts fuel emissions nearly in half compared to the recommended speed of 130km/h. We don't even pay for fuel, that's paid by my SO's employer, it's purely because it adds like 10% of time on most trips (those 2-3 minutes are negligible) and allows me to visit family without feeling as bad about individual transport (public transport isn't really an option here for trips further than the next city over, extremely poor connections even by German standards). Or wear extra clothing and put a blanket over my legs while working and see how low we can put the heater. Or not heat the bedroom at all during fall/spring and take a hot water bottle up to get warm under the blanket (must be way more efficient than heating the whole room up). In short, yep I'm with you on not gambling on these estimates. But I'm also for nuance and being realistic lest someone claims that "ökos" / climate weirdos hugely exaggerated again and it's all not so bad. I find it tricky.

pas 6y ago
Or go faster and plant trees. If you pay for it that helps tree planting economies of scale. (Reforestation, not just monoculture.) I tried to do the same thing. Yes, individual actions have CO2e costs. It's not you, nor me, nor all of HN together that even can do anything impactful. Setting an example at best. (But then simply presenting a united coherent "yes carbon tax, yes ASAP, yes 125 USD/t" to everybody we discuss this with would probably help more.) That said, irrational alarmism is its own kind of hell.
- Aachen 6y ago
  Planting trees, carbon capture, etc. is NOT "going faster". It's definitely good if you can do it supplementary, if you have money to burn after funding things that will help reduce emissions (roof insulation, double windows, replace car with electric car, add rooftop solar, fund a solar park or wind turbine nearby, etc.), but in virtually all cases it's much more expensive than reducing emissions and helping others do the same. We need to explore how to live sustainably rather than hope everyone will pay for their share of carbon capture (in the form of trees or whatever) while "the others" fix the underlying problem. We'd need an absolutely humongous number of trees or capture plants to retrieve today's emissions. That said, I was actually just writing about the topic of planting trees :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25680156 > 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. I do need to sleep still tonight (0230 here) so I won't now type out (on mobile) the reasons I don't think trees are a reliable option. And by tomorrow it won't matter anymore, nobody will read it (I don't like the ephemerality of HN/reddit threads.) So these are my 2ct, hope I could clarify my reasoning as I will go sleep now.

loopz 6y ago

On the grander scale, there's no equilibrium.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
That's about ad ussefull as "everyone dies eventually, so why worry about murder?"
- loopz 6y ago
  Just that outside this one we don't know of any new equilibrium, the assumption in parent post.

beervirus 6y ago

We barely understand it, but yet we’re confident in the dozens of computer models of it that climatologists use that give varying results?

8note 6y ago
So far those models have been way too optimistic about things not being as bad, so my current priors would expect things to be worse than models say
- beervirus 6y ago
  That’s a funny way of saying “I trust them because they were wrong.”
pmiller2 6y ago
Except they don't give varying results. 10/14 models with published surface temperature predictions since the 1970s were statistically indistinguishable from reality: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-cli...
imtringued 6y ago
It only takes a glance at CO2 levels. You don't even have to predict anything to know that things are going to end badly.
- beervirus 6y ago
  You don't have to predict anything to predict what's going to happen?