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World to hit temperature tipping point 10 years faster than forecast
- qeternity 5y agoSupposedly the world’s first trillionaire will be minted in the ESG revolution. Part of me struggles to see how we link the economic incentives with urgently needed action, without government support.
- WA 5y agoThere’s a nice SciFi book about this: one person got incredibly rich, because he invented artificial trees that capture a lot of CO2. Good book, unfortunately only available in German: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38356981-hologrammatica https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38356981-hologrammati...
- noio 5y agoI often have this thought. If only one could bioengineer some kind of device that replicates itself and captures CO2 using sunlight. Oh right. We already have those. That’s a tree. We just need to stop cutting them down maybe.
- smallerfish 5y agoActually cutting them down is fine as long as we re-plant and slow down the decomp of the wood (by, e.g., using it in manufacturing or building.) Bamboo's also a good candidate for this cycle. Locking up atmospheric carbon in material that's going to be around for dozens or hundreds of years is a good thing.
- jacquesm 5y agoBamboo is interesting, both for strength-to-weight ratio and speed of growth. Is there a side-by-side comparison on how well it performs in this respect relative to other tree species?
- _Microft 5y agoWe do not need to find a use for the wood if we were determined that this is our carbon sequestration method and that it would be paid for by the public, i.e. that no otherwise viable business model is needed. We could put it into mines that we digged the carbon out from before - consider it paying back the carbon loans we took in the past. Or maybe use other mines for that: cavities of salt mines can be truly gigantic for example which might help with handling the material. Edit: I did some calculations and to sequester 1 Gt of carbon we would need to bury approximately 1.7 km^3 of (fresh) oak wood. That‘s a lot, especially since emissions were over 30Gt/a in 2020.
- jacquesm 5y agoEspecially because trees have a pretty slow start on the carbon capture curve over their lifetime, the amount of CO2 they can fixate is (roughly) proportional with the total surface of the leaves assuming sufficient water is present.
- samatman 5y agoIt's not quite that simple. Forests, as we're seeing right now, burn. Global trade has made this worse by spreading various pathogens and invasive creatures around the planet. Even the ones which don't burn reach a steady state (takes centuries, but gets close in decades), where rot releasing carbon and uptake into new growth balance out. To really fix carbon with plants, we want to grow something fast and woody, char it, and bury the char. Doesn't have to be deep, in fact working it into topsoil is a pretty good solution. This isn't anywhere close to sufficient, but it's necessary and we should be doing a lot of it.
- WJW 5y agoWhy needlessly hamstring yourself by specifying that any solution needs to be done without any government involvement? Governments are difficult to work with and slow to get moving, but they wield a level of resources unmatched by any company. It'd be like insisting on transporting oil across the ocean but disqualifying the use of oil tankers beforehand because they are expensive and can't dock in every port.
- qeternity 5y agoI think you misunderstood my comment.
- m4r35n357 5y agoPaywall
- vpj 5y agoAtlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes - study HN Discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28082887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28082887 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28078575 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28091087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28091087
- truculent 5y agoIf you took each IPCC report and made every number 20% worse (larger or smaller depending on the context), would you end up with a better set of predictions?
- oefrha 5y agohttps://archive.is/X3zJY https://archive.is/X3zJY
- bamboozled 5y agoGeez, you'd think there were no alternatives to continuing to burn fossil fuels or something ?
- taneq 5y agoThere are plenty of alternatives but they're not cost effective...
- ajnin 5y agoIt's not true, solar is very cost effective, cheaper than coal. But there are industries build around extracting coal from the ground and they have an interest to continue to push coal.
- ttonkytonk 5y ago..and it seems like these guys got more power than the politicians.
- refurb 5y agoSo why do companies continue to buy electricity made from coal if solar is cheaper?
- taneq 5y agoAll up installed cost of solar per kWh is now cheaper than fossil fuel fired power plants but it's only been that way for a couple of years. Power plants are build based on a 30-50 year lifecycle. It's like trying to steer an oil tanker (hah) - we ARE turning, it just takes a while.
- zz865 5y agoIs anywhere getting better? It seems the whole world is either flooding or burning right now, it seems pretty bleak. Surely some places will become nicer places to live. My friend in Chicago said winters are getting milder but summers staying the same. Eastern Canada & Greenland maybe too?
- mFixman 5y agoWeather isn't felt in a vacuum: you have to account for centuries of architecture and customs. Weather in London has become nicer in the last decade, with winters that are milder on average and summers that are warmer and sunnier (except this one). However, inside of London's thick stone houses you don't notice any difference in winter while you also are cooked alive in the summer heat.
- samatman 5y agoRetrofitting heat pumps is completely tractable. This has two advantages: it's more energy efficient than any other way of heating buildings, and they can be run in reverse for air conditioning. A lot of those buildings didn't come with indoor plumbing or electricity, after all.
- hcurtiss 5y agoI think we become victim to selection bias in reporting. There’s not much reporting when it’s just a beautiful day. Or even better than average over a longer than average time. That leads one to conclude it’s all going to hell, when in fact the real problem is we have increasingly real time knowledge of all the disasters everywhere across the globe.
- jmfldn 5y agoGood point. I don't doubt climate change or anything like that but the world seeming bleaker now than in previous times is, at least partly, a function of selection bias. In the past, even a news-hungry person would consume a daily news show and a daily newspaper at most. News consumption was very constrained even for the news fiends. Now we have realtime global news 24/7 coming at us from everywhere. Furthermore some of this tech is bi-directional so it amplifies the negative catastrophic stuff as it increases engagement / eyeballs and therefore money. It's a classic vicious circle (or a virtuous one if you're on the side making money from it!). It's an insane information environment out there if you choose to over indulge. If you're not careful you're constantly assaulted by an avalanche of negativity, and the world can start to feel very dark indeed. It's really not though. People from my generation (old millenial / young gen X) often hark back to the 1990s as some sort of halcyon age, but imagine if we had today's tech then. Imagine the 90s refracted through today's tech / media landscape. I bet we'd have felt differently about it.
- bloniac 5y agoI’ve heard no predictions though about what will happen to society.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oumua_don17 5y agoProbably because what's the point of predicting about something that may not exist as we know of it and experience it today.
- zthrowaway 5y agoSo we can fear monger all we want into forcing change in the west with alternative energy. But you can’t change how fossil fuels make things much easier and affordable in the rest of the world which is where a lot of the pollution exists at this point (India and China). To go through the amount of energy it takes to become a 1st world nation you need massive amounts of energy that is cheap to acquire and cheap to use. And right now that is fossil fuels. Alternative energy is a luxury. Hopefully someday the tech becomes more affordable for poor countries and can supply enough energy for them to get through an Industrial Age.
- nostrebored 5y agoDon't know why you're being downvoted. Zero carbon emissions is firstworldism at its core. Climate modeling is the pinnacle of pop sci. The intersection is very frustrating to live in.
- splitstud 5y agoYeah, I mean pop sci infers that it can actually be demonstrated to work.
- cinntaile 5y agoClimate modeling isn't pop sci, it's physics. Predicting the correct outcome of complex systems is hard or impossible and depends on a lot of assumptions and interactions that you have to properly account for, this stuff gets more refined over time. The general direction of the predictions hasn't changed though so ignoring that would still be unwise.
- loa_in_ 5y agoThe bad process began before we even conceived a notion of a global climate, and continues only because we're used to it. But continuing it still will change the global environment forever
- nostrebored 5y agoIt's unfalsifiable at its core. Predictions will continue to be alarmist and unmet. Modeling decades out is impossible for systems we do understand. For systems we don't -- like climate -- it's an exercise in confirmation bias.
- dead-snake 5y agoThese doomsday prophecies are always conveniently distant. You can tell people any scary nonsense as long as it's far enough away that everyone will have forgotten the details of your prediction by the time it fails to come to pass. It's just the same as how we can show people today any number of doomsday prophecies from the past about how the world was definitely going to be wrecked by 2020, or 2010, or 2000, or 1990, but somehow nobody thinks they were serious back then... but then they take the doomsday prophecy about 2030 seriously.
- throwawaycuriou 5y agoThe Branch Davidians said the world is ending in 1993. That doesn't render our understanding of climate change 'scary nonsense'.
- WesleyHale 5y agoThe issue OP is making is that climate scientists have forecasted "tipping points"[0] for years on end now, and none of them have come true. It ruins the credibility of these "point of no return" articles. [0] https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/ https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
- headmelted 5y agoNo-one’s arguing a cliff edge other than media spinning drama for clicks. The direction of travel has been clear, understood and consistent for decades, as has the messaging from the scientific community around it.
- ajnin 5y agoYou seem to be confusing a bunch of cherry-picked newspaper clippings with scientific research.
- DennisP 5y agoNot sure what sort of "coming true" you guys are expecting. We're looking at a pretty unusual level of drought, fires, and flooding disasters all over the world, new temperature records almost every year, and faster temperature increases and ice loss than the IPCC had projected. Back in 2007 the book Six Degrees was published, with one chapter per degree of warming, summing up the science of what results we would see. We're at one degree and everything in that chapter is happening now.
- Comevius 5y agoStrange to live in a world that failed to incentivise it's own survival. You would think that trillion dollar companies like Amazon would care about not being able to operate at all in a few decades. I get it from behavioral science why it all works like this, but one still wonders if it's the same for every other civilizations out there, if there are any.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoWhy would Amazon care more than others (which, in average, is not caring enough)? If anything, with the wealth/asset they have, they would likely do better than most of other company/people/entity when things went south. Don't get me wrong, I wish they would, I just don't find it's hard to understand why they don't.
- Comevius 5y agoI don't find it hard to understand either, as I said behavioral science 101. I just find it disappointing.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoFor what it’s worth, Amazon does care about doing more than required about climate change. They’re moving to 100% renewable energy within the next few years and funding alternative energy and sustainability research on the order of billions of dollars: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-pledge https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/about/the-climate-ple... You can find similar commitments from other big tech companies like Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-be-100-percent-carbon-neutral-for-its-supply-chain-and-products-by-2030/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-commits-to-be-1... Let’s focus on the lawmakers who are failing us, not the big tech companies who are already doing more than required by law to reduce their footprint.
- thrdbndndn 5y agoThanks, good to know.
- Aeolun 5y agoWhich tipping point? We’ve passed so many tipping points by now that it’s just so much noise when someone announces we’re going to pass one 10 years earlier.
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoTipping point is considered 450ppmv CO2, a point at which no technology can reverse worst-case climate change scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...
- samatman 5y agoThe second paragraph of that page says "Climate scientists have identified over a dozen possible tipping points".
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoFrom the article first paragraph "with temperatures set to punch through the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius *threshold* by the early 2030s, a decade earlier than anticipated just three years ago."
- dead-snake 5y agoSo, if 450 ppm is bad, wouldn't 900 ppm be worse? It wasn't so long ago in the climate's history that it was that way. Not so long before that, it was 1800. Wouldn't that make the world ultra-XXXL screwed beyond belief? What happened there?
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago13 Misconceptions About Global Warming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn’t Exist https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-last-time-co2-was-this-high-humans-didnt-exist-15938 https://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-last-time-co2-was-th... CO2 – Why 450 ppm is Dangerous and 350 ppm is Safe https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2014/01/07/co2-why-450-ppm-is-dangerous-and-350-ppm-is-safe/ https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2014/01/07/co2-why-450-p... And of course this one: https://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm https://skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm
- nikkinana 5y agoWater is the next crisis. Climate is so 1990's. Get with the program, fool.
- imgabe 5y agoAn article so vitally important to the survival of humanity that it had to be hidden behind a paywall.
- xwdv 5y agoStarting to look like the end. If you were to have a child now they would likely be dead from climate change before their 30th birthday.
- samatman 5y agoThis is totally absurd and unjustifiable fearmongering.
- xwdv 5y agoWishful thinking. You either don’t think climate change will have life and death consequences or you have a lot of hope that humanity will get its shit together and solve it in the next decade. Life expectancy isn’t going to go up, and quality of life won’t improve after the tipping point. It’s all downhill beyond that.
- Fricken 5y agoIt don't consider the parent's scenario to be likely, but it's on the table. We are in deep shit.
- Throwaway197401 5y agoIn other words. Speculative forecasting replaces other speculative forecasting. I would urge anyone who gets worried every time they see these kind of headlines based on modelling, to spend some time reading about how modelling and prediction actually work to understand what is really going on. Any critically thinking person should take notice when you only hear about how the models have been underestimating the severity even though they are constantly wrong both ways. Yes the temperature is changing, no it's not something we can't handle.
- knuthsat 5y agoThe thing about these models is that they are not necessary if you want to understand the magnitude of change. For example, we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the emissions of CO2 equivalent gases a year that we do as humanity. Then we can estimate correctly (within the same order of magnitude) the CO2 equivalent gases stored in permafrost or ice. [0] Now we can ask a question. What if the ice melts? How many years of 2020 human activity is stored there. It ends up being more than 100 years of 2020 emissions. It does not really take that much modelling to realize that a temperature increase that melts the permafrost can result in completely unpredictable outcomes, that are very probably not positive. That is of course, if one believes in human caused climate change. The amount of CO2 equivalent gases that is emitted by everything else (not humans) is magnitudes more, but obviously it was not a problem for the Earth to handle before. Now, the n-th order effects will increase the rate of warming and will cause new invisible effects. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
- Throwaway197401 5y agoI am unconvinced by your argument. The models are trying to predict based on various factors, CO2 being one of them. If you were correct all you are really saying is that the models could be much simpler than still be precise. So on that alone it seems like you are missing the point. Second of all, while most agree human activity have some correlation with temperature rise we have no actual idea how much. There is no scientifically demonstrated percentage of the temperature that can be attributed to humans. With regards to the permafrost. This is pure speculation and in many ways relies on the accuracy of the models and doesn't take human ability to deal with it into account. It might be bad it might not, regardless we can't stop living the way we do just because there is some percentage risk of bad outcomes. We should always take the climate seriously but so should we any other event like astroids hitting earth, super vulcanos, nearby super novas, pandemics etc. The world is always and have always been filled with dangers which is why 99.99999% of all species ever existed are extinct way before humans were around.
- RickJWagner 5y agoIf the Covid lockdowns and remote-work bonanza didn't change the trajectory, there doesn't seem to be much that will.