5 ms·

Global warming predictions are overestimated, suggests study on black carbon

29 points by 1gor 18y ago

ksvs 18y ago
How did gibsonf1 miss this one?
dflock 18y ago
This is based on soil studies of a limited number of sites in Australia. It implies that as these soils contained more black carbon (soot) than thought - which takes 1-2k yrs to convert to CO2, rather than 100 yrs for organic carbon - soil will contribute less to global warming. This makes sense but surely to include this in global climate models, you'd need good soot content estimates for a variety of soils worldwide? Either a good global average derived from a wide range of measurements, or an actual global soil map included in the simulation?
- 1gor 18y ago
  >soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact. (from the article)
yummyfajitas 18y ago
"... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds...." Freeman Dyson
- ivankirigin 18y ago
  Dyson also describes a solution to any warming that is relevant to the article: better land management. It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then soil, then back. Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy. Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil: 1. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal 2. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
  - Retric 18y ago
    I think it's important to consider the amount of fossil fuels we are using. One example that springs to mind at one of the older coal power plants in WV they decided to change the location where they deposited the coal ash that was left over. It turns out over the last 40 years they had just kept making a larger mount and it was about to become the tallest mountain in the state. Now you might wonder how this ends up but the simple fact is coal is mindbogglingly cheep. There is literally mounds of the stuff which you basically pickup off the ground. (It's slightly worse than that but not by much.)
    - Alex3917 18y ago
      In Appalachia there are coal fires that have been burning for thirty or forty years, and they are allowed to keep burning because the coal is worth less than what it would cost to pipe in enough water to put out the fires.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    I'm not sure about the all the science behind this (it's a very big field...), but those at real climate have addressed some of the issues here, for example: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freeman-dysons-selective-vision/#more-568 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freema... Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.
tocomment 18y ago
Random global warming thought; can anyone here believe that we'll have a technological singularity in 20 years, and be worried about global warming? I just realized that's why I'm not worried about it. I.e. technology will probably save us. Am I too optimistic?
- gaius 18y ago
  20 years?! We can't even make an AI as smart as an ant yet.
  - tjpick 18y ago
    needn't be AI. What about biotech etc?
    - gaius 18y ago
      That's not what Singulatarians believe.
  - ibsulon 18y ago
    Kurzweil suggests that these technological improvements happen on an exponential scale -- that the gap from 0 to ant is greater than from ant to human.
    - yters 18y ago
      I like basing my life on theories that are not complete speculation.
  - Retric 18y ago
    We have AI smarter than a single ant and we know enough about ant brains to be able to tell. One of the branches of AI research focuses on modeling neurons and building systems which demonstrate identical behaviors to tapeworms or ant's etc. The next step seems to be modeling rat brains, but the gap between human and rat is a lot smaller than the gap between rat and ant.
- 18y ago
fallentimes 18y ago
It seems the only thing every side can agree on is that pollution is bad. If you can reduce pollution & consumption without incurring additional costs (not just monetary), please try to do so.
- mseebach 18y ago
  I think the divide isn't really between "believing" in global warming or not - but between blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism, and placing as a premise for a solution that we can't allow our progress to slow down to fix this, and we CERTAINLY can't ask China and India to slow down theirs. The former is (roughly) the Kyoto/Copenhagen bunch, the latter is the "spend A LOT - NOW on nuclear energy (we need a lot of energy, and it will keep growing) and research in energy storage (fuel cells etc.) and biotech (get rid of the C02 we already have)".
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    There's a lot of people who think it's all a media scam. Go to freerepublic.com or listen to Rush if you dare.
  - pg 18y ago
    blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism Industry in communist countries tended to be a lot more polluting, actually.
Allocator2008 18y ago
I wonder what affect the studies on black carbon will have on the projected prevalence of the man-bear-pig?
patrickg-zill 18y ago
The reality is, that even with computers 100 times more powerful than we have now, the problem remains: we don't have the ability to accurately come up with a working mathematical model of "how it works" - much less run that model through a computer.
yters 18y ago
I highly recommend James Hogan's Kicking the Sacred Cow. He very persuasively shows the baselessness of some of science's most strongly believed "facts." This applies not only to global warming, but also things like Darwinism, AIDs, environmental scares, even the big bang and relativity.
- eru 18y ago
  How about the round earth?

29 points by 1gor 18y ago

ksvs 18y ago

How did gibsonf1 miss this one?

This is based on soil studies of a limited number of sites in Australia. It implies that as these soils contained more black carbon (soot) than thought - which takes 1-2k yrs to convert to CO2, rather than 100 yrs for organic carbon - soil will contribute less to global warming. This makes sense but surely to include this in global climate models, you'd need good soot content estimates for a variety of soils worldwide? Either a good global average derived from a wide range of measurements, or an actual global soil map included in the simulation?

1gor 18y ago
>soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact. (from the article)

yummyfajitas 18y ago

"... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds...." Freeman Dyson

ivankirigin 18y ago
Dyson also describes a solution to any warming that is relevant to the article: better land management. It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then soil, then back. Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy. Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil: 1. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal 2. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
- Retric 18y ago
  I think it's important to consider the amount of fossil fuels we are using. One example that springs to mind at one of the older coal power plants in WV they decided to change the location where they deposited the coal ash that was left over. It turns out over the last 40 years they had just kept making a larger mount and it was about to become the tallest mountain in the state. Now you might wonder how this ends up but the simple fact is coal is mindbogglingly cheep. There is literally mounds of the stuff which you basically pickup off the ground. (It's slightly worse than that but not by much.)
  - Alex3917 18y ago
    In Appalachia there are coal fires that have been burning for thirty or forty years, and they are allowed to keep burning because the coal is worth less than what it would cost to pipe in enough water to put out the fires.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  I'm not sure about the all the science behind this (it's a very big field...), but those at real climate have addressed some of the issues here, for example: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freeman-dysons-selective-vision/#more-568 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freema... Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.

tocomment 18y ago

Random global warming thought; can anyone here believe that we'll have a technological singularity in 20 years, and be worried about global warming? I just realized that's why I'm not worried about it. I.e. technology will probably save us. Am I too optimistic?

gaius 18y ago
20 years?! We can't even make an AI as smart as an ant yet.
- tjpick 18y ago
  needn't be AI. What about biotech etc?
  - gaius 18y ago
    That's not what Singulatarians believe.
- ibsulon 18y ago
  Kurzweil suggests that these technological improvements happen on an exponential scale -- that the gap from 0 to ant is greater than from ant to human.
  - yters 18y ago
    I like basing my life on theories that are not complete speculation.
- Retric 18y ago
  We have AI smarter than a single ant and we know enough about ant brains to be able to tell. One of the branches of AI research focuses on modeling neurons and building systems which demonstrate identical behaviors to tapeworms or ant's etc. The next step seems to be modeling rat brains, but the gap between human and rat is a lot smaller than the gap between rat and ant.
18y ago

fallentimes 18y ago

It seems the only thing every side can agree on is that pollution is bad. If you can reduce pollution & consumption without incurring additional costs (not just monetary), please try to do so.

mseebach 18y ago
I think the divide isn't really between "believing" in global warming or not - but between blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism, and placing as a premise for a solution that we can't allow our progress to slow down to fix this, and we CERTAINLY can't ask China and India to slow down theirs. The former is (roughly) the Kyoto/Copenhagen bunch, the latter is the "spend A LOT - NOW on nuclear energy (we need a lot of energy, and it will keep growing) and research in energy storage (fuel cells etc.) and biotech (get rid of the C02 we already have)".
- fallentimes 18y ago
  There's a lot of people who think it's all a media scam. Go to freerepublic.com or listen to Rush if you dare.
- pg 18y ago
  blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and capitalism Industry in communist countries tended to be a lot more polluting, actually.

Allocator2008 18y ago

I wonder what affect the studies on black carbon will have on the projected prevalence of the man-bear-pig?

patrickg-zill 18y ago

The reality is, that even with computers 100 times more powerful than we have now, the problem remains: we don't have the ability to accurately come up with a working mathematical model of "how it works" - much less run that model through a computer.

yters 18y ago

I highly recommend James Hogan's Kicking the Sacred Cow. He very persuasively shows the baselessness of some of science's most strongly believed "facts." This applies not only to global warming, but also things like Darwinism, AIDs, environmental scares, even the big bang and relativity.

eru 18y ago
How about the round earth?