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The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record

15 points by kaboro 6y ago

wmeredith 6y ago
I read the first 16 paragraphs of this story and still don’t know what the hell the clickbait headline is referring to. I give up.
- hactually 6y ago
  I read it to the end. It's an amazing longform piece that really shows where we're headed and the bits we might be missing as we lurch towards a super warmed Earth. Tldr - no. Work on your attention span and read this excellent article.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ehvatum 6y ago
Will we invest in nuclear power? No.
magneticnorth 6y ago
The terrifying warning is that we have to go tens of millions of years back in earth's history to reach previous times when the atmospheric carbon level matched what we know we will see in the next few decades, and in those past times the planet's temperature was 5-10 degrees celsius warmer than it is now, not the 2 degrees we are hoping to stabilize at. An even more terrifying warning is that at the times in the past where atmospheric carbon was at ~1000 ppm - much higher than we currently have, but unfortunately not unrealistic for our future - the atmospheric warming was 13 degrees C above today. This matches a terrifying result from a Caltech cloud model that indicates that at 1200 ppm carbon or about 4 degrees C of warming from the current day (and with big error bars on this estimate!), stratocumulus clouds will no longer be able to form and we will see runaway global warming - their estimates were a leap from 4 C to 12 C. Our previous estimates had put us at ~4C at ~1000 ppm carbon, but the geologic record indicates we should expect much, much more warming at the levels of carbon we are likely to see in the next centuries.
- rekabis 6y ago
  You nail that issue on the head. Humanity, at least at the 2+ billion population levels, is truly fucked. We are projected to be just past our 10 Billion peak by 2100, and yet climate projections for that point indicates that even at a 100% vegetarian/vegan population, it is unlikely that the planet could support more than 2 Billion. We would have the land to grow things, but not the topsoil, fresh water or hospitable and predictable climate with which to do so. Most of our current agricultural lands will, by that time, no longer be capable of agriculture at scale, or any agriculture at all. This is why I now consider having offspring to be explicit and malicious abuse of those offspring: we now know what is coming down the pipe, and it will lead to lives - even in the first world - to be nasty, brutish and short at some point after the 2050s. And certainly starting well before, for the poorer parts of the planet. Unless you are a card-carrying member of the Parasite Class (and therefore can pay to delay the fallout for a generation or two) having children now is to doom them to a viciously painful adult life.

15 points by kaboro 6y ago

I read the first 16 paragraphs of this story and still don’t know what the hell the clickbait headline is referring to. I give up.

hactually 6y ago
I read it to the end. It's an amazing longform piece that really shows where we're headed and the bits we might be missing as we lurch towards a super warmed Earth. Tldr - no. Work on your attention span and read this excellent article.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ehvatum 6y ago

Will we invest in nuclear power? No.

magneticnorth 6y ago

The terrifying warning is that we have to go tens of millions of years back in earth's history to reach previous times when the atmospheric carbon level matched what we know we will see in the next few decades, and in those past times the planet's temperature was 5-10 degrees celsius warmer than it is now, not the 2 degrees we are hoping to stabilize at. An even more terrifying warning is that at the times in the past where atmospheric carbon was at ~1000 ppm - much higher than we currently have, but unfortunately not unrealistic for our future - the atmospheric warming was 13 degrees C above today. This matches a terrifying result from a Caltech cloud model that indicates that at 1200 ppm carbon or about 4 degrees C of warming from the current day (and with big error bars on this estimate!), stratocumulus clouds will no longer be able to form and we will see runaway global warming - their estimates were a leap from 4 C to 12 C. Our previous estimates had put us at ~4C at ~1000 ppm carbon, but the geologic record indicates we should expect much, much more warming at the levels of carbon we are likely to see in the next centuries.

rekabis 6y ago
You nail that issue on the head. Humanity, at least at the 2+ billion population levels, is truly fucked. We are projected to be just past our 10 Billion peak by 2100, and yet climate projections for that point indicates that even at a 100% vegetarian/vegan population, it is unlikely that the planet could support more than 2 Billion. We would have the land to grow things, but not the topsoil, fresh water or hospitable and predictable climate with which to do so. Most of our current agricultural lands will, by that time, no longer be capable of agriculture at scale, or any agriculture at all. This is why I now consider having offspring to be explicit and malicious abuse of those offspring: we now know what is coming down the pipe, and it will lead to lives - even in the first world - to be nasty, brutish and short at some point after the 2050s. And certainly starting well before, for the poorer parts of the planet. Unless you are a card-carrying member of the Parasite Class (and therefore can pay to delay the fallout for a generation or two) having children now is to doom them to a viciously painful adult life.