11 ms·

Estimates of plant CO2 uptake rise by nearly one third

194 points by akyuu 2y ago

ycombineit 2y ago
Perfect. More fodder for the anti-science idiots to prove how clean air isn't a big deal.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  You're angry at the good news that CO2 is being absorbed by nature more than previously believed?
  - DoctorOetker 2y ago
    it's not good news if forests are disappearing faster than being regrown.
  - latexr 2y ago
    That is not at all the sentiment GP is expressing. Say you have a terminal disease. Doctors evaluated the progression of your illness and estimated you have three years to live. Of course, when you begin treatment changes your life expectancy: start now and you may get twenty more years; start in two years and you’ll only get an extra four. Your insurance company says “doctors are all quacks, you’re not ill, they’re just in it for the money” and don’t pay you anything. They know that’s a lie and that after you die there is a high probability your family will sue them out of existence, but the people currently in charge hope that will be far enough in the future they won’t have to personally worry about it. In the meantime they will enjoy the money they don’t pay you. As the months go by, you visibly deteriorate. It’s obvious you are sick. Your insurance maybe pays for some token cheap medicine to make you more comfortable and get themselves more leeway. Maybe that buys you an extra four months. They’ll be horrible but you will be alive and so your family can’t sue. They continue to be off the hook but it’s getting harder to escape the reality. Then a new doctor comes along and says “actually we overestimated the progression of your illness, you should’ve been given five years initially”. What do you think happens then? Obviously the insurance company will use that as an argument to further delay your treatment and double down on the rhetoric that all doctors are quacks. The damage is still happening but the urgent action needed to stave it off is once again delayed into the future. That is what GP is complaining about. It’s obviously good news that you’re not so close to death as you thought, but that knowledge may end up hurting you in the long run.
    - bradjohnson 2y ago
      Yes, this specific messaging feels motivated by the bottom lines of energy producers. The information doesn't actually change what we've measured regarding progress of climate change, but it's vague enough that plenty of people in the comments here are confused and acting like climate change isn't real after all.
    - timewizard 2y ago
      > Say you have a terminal disease. Just because a Doctor said so? Shouldn't we do some really good tests here first?
      - latexr 2y ago
        There’s nothing in the analogy which says no tests were run. You have to be arguing in really bad faith to come up with that one.
        timewizard 2y ago
        Well then it's a flawed analogy. There is no credible basis to say the planet is "dying" in same exigent sense you convey with this analogy. It's particularly bad faith to compare the lifespan of a Human with the imputed lifespan of Earth.
        latexr 2y ago
        Analogies are never perfect, they are a tool to explain an idea by way of drawing similarities. They are not meant to overlap perfectly, that would be a tautology. It’s not realistic to think one’s family could simply sue an insurance company or of existence. It’s pretty obvious to anyone engaging in good faith that the example is making a point for humans, not attempting to be taken literally by obtuse robots.
- rhaps0dy 2y ago
  You said it derogatorily, but it is genuine evidence that rising CO2 concentrations are have less effects than previously thought. In theory there could accumulate enough evidence to show anything.
  - mzhaase 2y ago
    That is exactly it - that's untrue. CO2 absorption was previously underestimated, but that does not change the rising concentration or the effect of CO2 on the climate.
    - argiopetech 2y ago
      But it might change what we view as a legitimate mitigation strategy. For example, could we burn oil at 2024's rates with 1900's forests and not have net-positive CO2 levels? Back of the napkin: - We're producing ~37 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) through burning of fossil fuels at the moment [0] - The current forestation level is ~4 billion hectares [1] - The net loss of forestation is ~1 billion hectares since 1900, with deforestation rates peaking starting ~100 years ago. [1] - 1 petagram == 1 Gt - Current forests consume 157 Gt/yr [article] Therefore, the billion hectares we cut down in the past century would consume an additional 157 * 0.25 == 39.25 GtCO2/yr if it were still standing, 2 Gt more than our historical maximum global net output. Obviously, the burning of fossil fuels is ultimate source of the increase in CO2, but without the deforestation it would still (back of the napkin) be sustainable. At least, we'd not be quite so far down this road. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
  - bradjohnson 2y ago
    No. That is an entirely incorrect interpretation of the study.
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  You show those anti-science folks with ..... more science?
- keybored 2y ago
  Selectively reporting scientific results based on how it will be used for fodder (?) just fuels anti-science sentiment.
  - bradjohnson 2y ago
    The messaging of this article is causing people in this very comment section to conclude that climate change is progressing slower (or even not progressing at all) based on a revision of a plant CO2 uptake study that was done in the 1980s. Like it or not climate science is extremely political and selectively reported science (which this is) that is presented to the public needs to account for the context in which it exists or it is no better than propaganda. The fact that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is primarily funded by the US Department of Energy is plenty of reason to be suspicious of its motivations. They have a vested interest in shaping the public's perception of energy production and its impact on the climate.
    - keybored 2y ago
      So they misrepresented the findings. I stand corrected.
- TaupeRanger 2y ago
  It isn't. Greenhouse emissions have remained roughly stagnant for over 30 years, while lung cancer deaths have dropped by 50-60 percent. Of course that's largely due to a decrease in smoking, but without any concomitant increase in mortality from "bad air", I don't see how anyone could think it's a "big deal". Sources: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-cancer-trends-brief/lung-cancer-mortality-(1) https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Those are two different things, though. Both linked to emissions, but in different ways. Also you had the wrong chart selected from that page, https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
  - jaapz 2y ago
    Are you seriously arguing that unhealthy air does not exist?
    - TaupeRanger 2y ago
      no, obviously not
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- timewizard 2y ago
  Everyone wants clean air. There is reasonable debate as to what that threshold should be and what human actions should be taken to improve it and this information adds to that debate. If you were looking for a data point to use as a cudgel against the "idiots" then you are failing in at least to known ways.
klausa 2y ago
As I understand the article; it’s not that we found out that they’ve _started_ absorbing more CO2; it’s that the previous estimations were flawed and we have new, improved ones.
- pmayrgundter 2y ago
  Not clear from the linked article. Did you see something else? NPP is probably increasing as it's been observed for years now that the earth is net greening in response to rising CO2
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  Isn’t this common knowledge among plant growers anyway? Plants can easily enjoy a co2 ppm of 1000+ in a greenhouse for faster growth. Photosynthesis involves an exchange of co2 to oxygen https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-dioxide-supplementation.html#:~:text=Plants%20show%20a%20positive%20response,plant%20damage%20(Figure%201) https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-....
mrs6969 2y ago
[flagged]
- birdiesanders 2y ago
  That’s not what this says.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  Bro...
- api 2y ago
  If plant uptake were counteracting emissions atmospheric CO2 ppm would not be rising so much. I wonder if it does mean planting trees or de-desertification might be more effective than estimated.
rob74 2y ago
"rises by nearly one third" sounds a bit strange to me, more correct would be "Plant CO2 uptake is currently underestimated by one third according to new research"? > The research, detailed in the journal Nature, is expected to improve Earth system simulations that scientists use to predict the future climate, and spotlights the importance of natural carbon sequestration for greenhouse gas mitigation. Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
- vasco 2y ago
  Not everywhere, between 2000 and 2020, 36 countries managed to get more tree cover than they lost, so we "just" need to expand this practice. https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest-gain https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest... > Even though the world gained 130.9 Mha of tree cover between 2000 and 2020, it still lost much more, with an overall net loss of 100.6 Mha. While the global numbers report a negative trajectory, there are distinct regional patterns or “hotspots” of net gain. At least 36 countries gained more tree cover than they lost over the 20-year time period. As a continent, Europe gained 6 million hectares of tree cover by 2020. Asia also had a large proportion of countries with net gain, particularly in Central and South Asia. The drivers of much of this gain (for example, what proportion is due to intentional restoration interventions versus land abandonment) are still difficult to determine using the available data, but are a key area for future research. Additionally, even though tree cover gain is occurring in many places, it doesn’t “cancel out” the impacts of loss. Primary forests in particular serve as critical carbon stores and support an intricate network of wildlife, none of which can easily be replaced once lost.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    I don't know that getting more trees than you lost is a useful or effective measure against climate change. It's a good thing, certainly, but I imagine the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere requires more than a steady state of trees. I wonder how much of the world we'd need to cover with trees in order to offset our carbon production, certainly more than we've had during modern civilization.
mschuster91 2y ago
> Pan-tropical rainforests accounted for the biggest difference between previous estimates and the new figures, a finding that was corroborated by ground measurements, Gu said. The discovery suggests that rainforests are a more important natural carbon sink than previously estimated using satellite data. And yet, we stand by on the sidelines while narco, wood and cattle organized crime cartels contaminate, log and burn down the rainforests. IMHO, at least the endangered rainforest belts should be placed under international supervision with a joint military cooperative on a shoot-to-kill order against these kinds of criminals. Think of an UN Blue Helmets mission, but not as a toothless "peacekeper corps" like the usual useless bullshit. The very ability of Earth to provide for human life hinges to a significant part on the continued existence and health of the rainforest ecosystem, and it is obvious now that many of the countries in which these forests lie are fundamentally incapable of maintaining this shared resource.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
Maybe we should pay for working greening efforts - aka artifical algea blooms ontop of the Marianna trench. Iron, phosphates, Air pumps and light transmitted into the depths where the growthcube rises. Have a rainforest fall into the depths forever every hour.
- thehappypm 2y ago
  Every tech like this has unforeseen consequences. And they could be worse than the original problem.
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    Every problem has unforeseen benefits. Global warming reduces the risk for nuclear winter when the resulting tribal conflicts lead to the nuclear regional exchange dice landing on that number that cant come up on repeated throws.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  There are a lot of people who think humanity will intentionally geo-engineer our way out the negative effects of our accidental geo-engineering. In part because it is something active that a single nation could do for itself. Like, China could just decide one day to do what you’re saying and it’s unlikely anyone would start a war to stop them. Seems scary because we don’t actually know how to do it, and we only have one planet. We could create horrible side effects like killing ocean life we depend on for food, or admire (e.g. whales). We also have evidence for a “snowball Earth” state at times in the past. What if we overcorrect? Lots of good sci-fi stories about that to chill our bones. The argument against it happening is that it would be expensive for that one nation, but benefits would not be proprietary. Whereas building out an economy of low-carbon power generation, manufacturing, and transportation creates tons of domestic economic benefits like jobs, trade, profits.
  - mzhaase 2y ago
    We have already geoengineered the temperature to be 0.2-0.4 C lower by container ships emitting SO2. We have also observed this a lot from volcanic eruptions. We should really at least try.
Prunkton 2y ago
>used new models and measurements to assess GPP from the land at 157 petagrams of carbon per year, up from an estimate of 120 petagrams established 40 years ago and currently used in most estimates of Earth’s carbon cycle >One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles. this sounds pretty significant. Any particular reason why it hasn't been updated for the last 40y?
- baq 2y ago
  Impressive, yes. Important? Absolutely. Significant? Not really. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
IvanK_net 2y ago
We could plant, cut down and burn trees for the energy, in a circle, and keep carbon levels in our atmosphere the same, instead of digging up new carbon from the ground and burning it. We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.
- voisin 2y ago
  > We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point. Location doesn’t matter. Duration of storage matters. If we could find a way to lock it up in a building material that would be effective and useful.
  - gs17 2y ago
    It's not exactly turning CO2 into bricks, but there's a few applications of biochar as an additive to improve concrete, asphalt, particleboard, etc.
- pjc50 2y ago
  This consumes far more land area than we have available. The first blast furnaces were indeed fuelled this way, from locally sourced charcoal, but coal/coke took over due to requiring far less effort (energy!) to extract. Going by https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy/catchment-area-analyses/#definitions https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy... , the UK's single large scale biomass power plant is fuelled by over sixteen million hectares (160,000km^2) or approximately one Wisconsin. If we wanted to power the whole UK electricity from biomass, we'd need ten Wisconsins. (Wisconsin, presumably, would have to find some other source of power in this scenario) (of course, Drax wasn't built to burn imported biomass, it was built to burn locally extracted coal ...)
  - OtherShrezzing 2y ago
    Drax uses about 12,000km^2, not 160,000km^2. A slightly more useful land area is the United Kingdom itself, which is 243,000km^2. With this technique, it takes an area 1/19th the size of the UK to produce 4% of its energy. This isn't a feasible approach to energy production, but it's an order of magnitude less bad than your figures have put forward.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
If trees are doing more work then we estimated in simulations, then good/bad, as we cut down forest we are doing more damage. But also, since trees do more work than we thought, then planting more will have bigger impact than past estimates.
- highcountess 2y ago
  That’s correct, but there is also something else, NASA has argued that their satellite imagery has shown an increase in the planet’s plant coverage as CO2 has increased, since to plants, CO2 is what not just oxygen is to us, but also in many ways like nourishment by absorbing the carbon from the air, which they use to grow.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Plants are generally not CO2 limited. General water is the limit - thus deserts are not very green despite having as much CO2. Even in wet climate a few weeks without rain and the plants are going dormant. In the ocean the limit is often other nutrients like iron. Attempts have been made to add iron to the ocean and those areas suddenly turned green (though it is not clear how sustainable this practice would be, nor if there might be other unknown negatives). That isn't to say CO2 is never the limit. Large greenhouses often are CO2 limited (often burning fossil fuels indoors to provide the CO2 without opening windows and thus letting something else undesired in). There are no doubt areas where CO2 is the limit and so NASA can see more green that is attributed to more CO2 - but still CO2 is rarely the limiting factor.
    - highcountess 2y ago
      This is a bunch of nonsense. Of course reduction in C02 can limit growth. You even make that very point by mentioning the use of CO2 generators in commercial greenhouse operations. The argument NASA makes is basically the same that CO2 increases have resulted in expected increases of plant growth, as is observable by satellite. I do not subscribe to the insane CO2 Bad religion that you appear to subscribe to because it is yet another dumb religion to harness the naive and gullible peasants, but you go right ahead. How about you stop being horrible to other people about it though and stop traveling and using technology that all produces CO2.
adamors 2y ago
Interesting that a couple of months ago there was an article which stated the exact opposite: > In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447 by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. > “We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September. > “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-c...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- carrychains 2y ago
  That's not the opposite. It's different context.
- gvx 2y ago
  Not exactly. The headline is a bit misleading imho: the article doesn't say that CO2 uptake by plants is up by 31%, rather that new estimates of the CO2 uptake by plants is 31% higher than previous estimates. That doesn't preclude a temporary collapse of carbon absorption (related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell).
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell Just trying to parse this - does that mean "a collapse in carbon absorption" actually means "more carbon was produced for the same amount of absorption"?
- know-how 2y ago
Earw0rm 2y ago
It's a useful datapoint in understanding the Earth's carbon cycle, but that's all - and it in no way changes the fact that the sum total of current human activity is dragging that cycle out of equilibrium by about 2.5-3ppm per year, or 8-10%ish per decade.
werdnapk 2y ago
I thought I'd read in the past that an uptake in C02 for plants/trees (and therefore faster growing) results in a weaker structure which doesn't stand up to the environment as well as slower growing trees.
jiehong 2y ago
We know that soils seem to absorb less carbon as plant absorb more [0]. It's fascinating to see all those studies improving our limited understanding of the biosphere. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03306-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03306-8
pjmlp 2y ago
Too bad we are currently too busy scaling up wars all over the place to bother with the planet state.
gitaarik 2y ago
> Plants the world over are absorbing about 31% more carbon dioxide than previously thought, according to a new assessment developed by scientists. So that means our supposed CO2 problem is 31% smaller than we previously thought?
- Flozzin 2y ago
  I would say no. We still have data on our year to year/decade to decade C02 in the atmosphere. So we can track how quickly it's rising. Those data points would already include any error we have in how much C02 is absorbed or created.
- thehappypm 2y ago
  Sadly not, because most carbon is absorbed by the ocean, not plants. And second because all of the nasty warming trends are still out there
  - gitaarik 2y ago
    Or this statistic means that actually much more oxygen is converted by plants compared to being processed by the ocean? So it means planting extra plants to fight CO2 is much more effective than previously thought?
- teamonkey 2y ago
  No, the atmospheric CO2 measurements are unaffected by this. We definitely have a CO2 problem despite plants being more effective at extracting it than previously thought. Another way of looking at it is that planting trees may be more effective at removing CO2 than previously thought, and deforestation somewhat more harmful.
  - gitaarik 2y ago
    Well, wouldn't it be correct to say that now, with the new numbers, CO2 uptake of plants will be 31% more than previously thought? So every coming year, there will be 31% more CO2 converted into oxygen than previously thought?
eggy 2y ago
If it has been underestimated then that means climate models have been using the bad, underestimated data, so they need to be updated and run to see where we are at, corrrect?
- jeffbee 2y ago
  No because we aren't reliant on a model of atmospheric CO2 concentration. We directly measure it.
  - wiz21c 2y ago
    You measure the past, but you don't measure the future, right ?
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      Right, this new estimate can be useful for decision support: if we plant X acres, how much CO2 would it absorb? It's not very important outside of that, and it cant have caused significant past errors because to date humans have not undertaken large-scale planting for CO2 absorption reasons.
      - akoboldfrying 2y ago
        >It's not very important outside of that, It's not very important outside of predicting the future of the climate accurately. That's not the kind of thing I'd write "It's not very important outside of" before. This "mere" prediction and decision support is the reason we fund the sciences.
      - eggy 2y ago
        Several countries have implemented large-scale planting efforts: China, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Australia, Pakistan, and Turkey to name a few. In 2019, Ethiopia claimed to have planted over 350 million trees in a single day as part of a broader initiative to plant 4 billion trees within a year to fight climate change.
  - 2y ago
starlite-5008 2y ago
[dead]
know-how 2y ago
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myrmidon 2y ago
This is interesting to know, but easy to overstate IMO. Back of the envelope number is 10 kg of CO2 absorbed per maturing tree and year (for ~20 years). This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me, and a factor of 30% is not gonna change this significantly. Renewables + electrification seems much more realistic, when countries like France are already under 5 tons CO2/year/person by relying on carbon-free electricity (US is at 15!). But it's still nice to know because at least planting/conserving trees apparently helps even more than expected...
- Someone 2y ago
  > This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me That’s 50 trees each year for each person, or, in the USA, about 17 billion trees, for a total new forest of 340 billion trees. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/16/the-countries-of-the-world-ranked-by-their-tree-wealth https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... says the USA has about 280 billion trees, so we’d ‘only’ have to grow that by 120%. That would grow forest in the USA from about 33% to about 75% of land area. Infeasible, but not completely impossible, I would think, from a ‘could we do it?’ viewpoint. ‘Is there a decent chance we’ll do that?’ probably has the answer “no”, though. For the USA, I guess cutting combining forestation with decreasing energy usage would be the easier option.
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    Thats an even bigger area than I imagined... Another big problem is that we'd have to grow those forests again after 20 years, because mature trees stop being a CO2 sink. The numbers/ratios should be even worse for Europe where the population density is higher. But I can totally see the approach working after scaling CO2 emissions down. I think going over single digit percentages of land area in forestation levels is already politically almost impossible-- agriculture alone is gonna meet any such attempt with ridicule at best and copious amounts of buckshot at worst...
deadbabe 2y ago
It feels like we can never catch a break. If we do something like underestimate the amount of CO2 plants absorb it still does nothing to change our fate. Is there anything in our climate models that if we got wrong would drastically reduce the estimated severity of long term impacts from climate?
- thrance 2y ago
  The trend is what it is, our models only allow us to explain why it is that way and what can be done about it.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  We don't ever actually know if any model is accurate -- that is, whether it actually models the underlying physical process. We just have a lot of models that have made predictions about the future that turned out to be more or less correct, much more often that you'd expect by chance, and so we develop trust in that correspondence with reality over time. It's possible that our current climate models are wrong, by a little or a lot. It's also possible that General Relativity is wrong -- gravity might stop at this time tomorrow. If you're interested, this issue is called the Problem of Induction in philosophy. (Confusingly, "induction" has a different meaning here than in mathematical induction.)
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Ah the greening earth FUD spread by big oil circa 2000s HN is playing all the greatest hits of denialism this week!
highwayman47 2y ago
CO2 is food for plants
- ben_w 2y ago
  And also a poison for them — just as oxygen is both of those things for us. (If oxygen isn't even a metaphorical food for us, then neither is CO2 for plants). Unfortunately, "food" is more complex than "how much carbohydrates do you get per day?"
  - coffeebeqn 2y ago
    We still have ways to go to that. From the current 400 ppm to about 2000ppm before the apocalypse. Until then the yields will generally improve from today’s baseline. There might be other systems that break before that and we get plantocalypse earlier
- timeon 2y ago
  And your point is?
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    Apparently the more of it there is, the more they eat. It's called "an implication", or "logical consequence".
newsclues 2y ago
So perhaps the alarmist climate models were incorrect and most be corrected before they are used to shape public policy?
- bradjohnson 2y ago
  No. This changes nothing about climate models.
Terr_ 2y ago
Unfortunately this doesn't mean much for the practical problem, because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots. It's like we've got a bathtub where the water level is rising, because we won't turn off the tap and the drain is only so big. We can lower the apparent water-level by throwing in a bunch of plant-sponges, but we can't just keep adding more indefinitely.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  >because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots. If that's true, there would seem to be no benefit to the climate in preserving or regenerating forests.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Correct, in the long-term. Like how a temporary loan is somewhat wasted if the breathing-room it generates is only used to delay fixing the budget shortfall. https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/why-temporary-carbon-storage-in-forests-has-little-climate-value-part-1/ https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/why-tempora...
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      Thanks for responding. I think the part of the page you linked that is relevant to this topic is: >But when forest carbon is released—which could happen when trees die in a changing climate, or when short-term carbon offset contracts expire and allow landowners to clear their forests—temperatures inevitably go up. The first part ("when trees die in a changing climate") links to a National Geographic article behind a paywall. Before the paywall appeared, I noticed it said something about "drought or fire", which leads me to wonder whether the loss of forest carbon occurs only under those conditions. Is that right? If so, by avoiding those conditions, we coughs avoid that loss.
narrator 2y ago
Ok guys, this climate change stuff is temporarily off the menu until we win the great power AI war with China. Same goes for nuclear power. Send the memo out that we love nuclear power now after 40 years of hating it.[1] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/96aa8d1a-bbf1-4b35-8680-d1fef36ef067 https://www.ft.com/content/96aa8d1a-bbf1-4b35-8680-d1fef36ef...
- thrance 2y ago
  Climate change stuff is off the menu until Americans elect a president that actually believes in climate change. There is no "power AI war with China", this is just another pretext from the GOP to fuel the extraction industry with public money, and "drill, baby, drill".
  - narrator 2y ago
    What about the nuclear power stuff though? That was a Biden initiative and a huge reversal of the past 40 years of Democratic Party policy. Just seems like things are moving in energy policy.
    - thrance 2y ago
      It's too little, too late, but I'll still take it. However I still have a hard time believing banks and other private actors will go through funding 20+ years projects like nuclear reactors in today's short-termist economy.
casenmgreen 2y ago
This kind of change is deeply worrying, because on the face of it, it implies means estimates of climate change are potentially rather unsound - such large changes in mechanisms central to change - and so climate change could be much worse than we expect. If climate change isn't so bad, then phew, but if it's actually worse, then we are in even more deadly trouble than we already are.
muth02446 2y ago
What does that mean for all the existing simulations that use the "wrong" values? BTW: are there any open source climate models/simulations?

194 points by akyuu 2y ago

ycombineit 2y ago

Perfect. More fodder for the anti-science idiots to prove how clean air isn't a big deal.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
You're angry at the good news that CO2 is being absorbed by nature more than previously believed?
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  it's not good news if forests are disappearing faster than being regrown.
- latexr 2y ago
  That is not at all the sentiment GP is expressing. Say you have a terminal disease. Doctors evaluated the progression of your illness and estimated you have three years to live. Of course, when you begin treatment changes your life expectancy: start now and you may get twenty more years; start in two years and you’ll only get an extra four. Your insurance company says “doctors are all quacks, you’re not ill, they’re just in it for the money” and don’t pay you anything. They know that’s a lie and that after you die there is a high probability your family will sue them out of existence, but the people currently in charge hope that will be far enough in the future they won’t have to personally worry about it. In the meantime they will enjoy the money they don’t pay you. As the months go by, you visibly deteriorate. It’s obvious you are sick. Your insurance maybe pays for some token cheap medicine to make you more comfortable and get themselves more leeway. Maybe that buys you an extra four months. They’ll be horrible but you will be alive and so your family can’t sue. They continue to be off the hook but it’s getting harder to escape the reality. Then a new doctor comes along and says “actually we overestimated the progression of your illness, you should’ve been given five years initially”. What do you think happens then? Obviously the insurance company will use that as an argument to further delay your treatment and double down on the rhetoric that all doctors are quacks. The damage is still happening but the urgent action needed to stave it off is once again delayed into the future. That is what GP is complaining about. It’s obviously good news that you’re not so close to death as you thought, but that knowledge may end up hurting you in the long run.
  - bradjohnson 2y ago
    Yes, this specific messaging feels motivated by the bottom lines of energy producers. The information doesn't actually change what we've measured regarding progress of climate change, but it's vague enough that plenty of people in the comments here are confused and acting like climate change isn't real after all.
  - timewizard 2y ago
    > Say you have a terminal disease. Just because a Doctor said so? Shouldn't we do some really good tests here first?
    - latexr 2y ago
      There’s nothing in the analogy which says no tests were run. You have to be arguing in really bad faith to come up with that one.
      - timewizard 2y ago
        Well then it's a flawed analogy. There is no credible basis to say the planet is "dying" in same exigent sense you convey with this analogy. It's particularly bad faith to compare the lifespan of a Human with the imputed lifespan of Earth.
        latexr 2y ago
        Analogies are never perfect, they are a tool to explain an idea by way of drawing similarities. They are not meant to overlap perfectly, that would be a tautology. It’s not realistic to think one’s family could simply sue an insurance company or of existence. It’s pretty obvious to anyone engaging in good faith that the example is making a point for humans, not attempting to be taken literally by obtuse robots.
rhaps0dy 2y ago
You said it derogatorily, but it is genuine evidence that rising CO2 concentrations are have less effects than previously thought. In theory there could accumulate enough evidence to show anything.
- mzhaase 2y ago
  That is exactly it - that's untrue. CO2 absorption was previously underestimated, but that does not change the rising concentration or the effect of CO2 on the climate.
  - argiopetech 2y ago
    But it might change what we view as a legitimate mitigation strategy. For example, could we burn oil at 2024's rates with 1900's forests and not have net-positive CO2 levels? Back of the napkin: - We're producing ~37 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) through burning of fossil fuels at the moment [0] - The current forestation level is ~4 billion hectares [1] - The net loss of forestation is ~1 billion hectares since 1900, with deforestation rates peaking starting ~100 years ago. [1] - 1 petagram == 1 Gt - Current forests consume 157 Gt/yr [article] Therefore, the billion hectares we cut down in the past century would consume an additional 157 * 0.25 == 39.25 GtCO2/yr if it were still standing, 2 Gt more than our historical maximum global net output. Obviously, the burning of fossil fuels is ultimate source of the increase in CO2, but without the deforestation it would still (back of the napkin) be sustainable. At least, we'd not be quite so far down this road. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
- bradjohnson 2y ago
  No. That is an entirely incorrect interpretation of the study.
jasonjayr 2y ago
You show those anti-science folks with ..... more science?
keybored 2y ago
Selectively reporting scientific results based on how it will be used for fodder (?) just fuels anti-science sentiment.
- bradjohnson 2y ago
  The messaging of this article is causing people in this very comment section to conclude that climate change is progressing slower (or even not progressing at all) based on a revision of a plant CO2 uptake study that was done in the 1980s. Like it or not climate science is extremely political and selectively reported science (which this is) that is presented to the public needs to account for the context in which it exists or it is no better than propaganda. The fact that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is primarily funded by the US Department of Energy is plenty of reason to be suspicious of its motivations. They have a vested interest in shaping the public's perception of energy production and its impact on the climate.
  - keybored 2y ago
    So they misrepresented the findings. I stand corrected.
TaupeRanger 2y ago
It isn't. Greenhouse emissions have remained roughly stagnant for over 30 years, while lung cancer deaths have dropped by 50-60 percent. Of course that's largely due to a decrease in smoking, but without any concomitant increase in mortality from "bad air", I don't see how anyone could think it's a "big deal". Sources: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-cancer-trends-brief/lung-cancer-mortality-(1) https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
- pjc50 2y ago
  Those are two different things, though. Both linked to emissions, but in different ways. Also you had the wrong chart selected from that page, https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
- jaapz 2y ago
  Are you seriously arguing that unhealthy air does not exist?
  - TaupeRanger 2y ago
    no, obviously not
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
timewizard 2y ago
Everyone wants clean air. There is reasonable debate as to what that threshold should be and what human actions should be taken to improve it and this information adds to that debate. If you were looking for a data point to use as a cudgel against the "idiots" then you are failing in at least to known ways.

klausa 2y ago

As I understand the article; it’s not that we found out that they’ve _started_ absorbing more CO2; it’s that the previous estimations were flawed and we have new, improved ones.

pmayrgundter 2y ago
Not clear from the linked article. Did you see something else? NPP is probably increasing as it's been observed for years now that the earth is net greening in response to rising CO2
coffeebeqn 2y ago
Isn’t this common knowledge among plant growers anyway? Plants can easily enjoy a co2 ppm of 1000+ in a greenhouse for faster growth. Photosynthesis involves an exchange of co2 to oxygen https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-dioxide-supplementation.html#:~:text=Plants%20show%20a%20positive%20response,plant%20damage%20(Figure%201) https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-....

mrs6969 2y ago

[flagged]

birdiesanders 2y ago
That’s not what this says.
hiddencost 2y ago
Bro...
api 2y ago
If plant uptake were counteracting emissions atmospheric CO2 ppm would not be rising so much. I wonder if it does mean planting trees or de-desertification might be more effective than estimated.

rob74 2y ago

"rises by nearly one third" sounds a bit strange to me, more correct would be "Plant CO2 uptake is currently underestimated by one third according to new research"? > The research, detailed in the journal Nature, is expected to improve Earth system simulations that scientists use to predict the future climate, and spotlights the importance of natural carbon sequestration for greenhouse gas mitigation. Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...

vasco 2y ago
Not everywhere, between 2000 and 2020, 36 countries managed to get more tree cover than they lost, so we "just" need to expand this practice. https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest-gain https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest... > Even though the world gained 130.9 Mha of tree cover between 2000 and 2020, it still lost much more, with an overall net loss of 100.6 Mha. While the global numbers report a negative trajectory, there are distinct regional patterns or “hotspots” of net gain. At least 36 countries gained more tree cover than they lost over the 20-year time period. As a continent, Europe gained 6 million hectares of tree cover by 2020. Asia also had a large proportion of countries with net gain, particularly in Central and South Asia. The drivers of much of this gain (for example, what proportion is due to intentional restoration interventions versus land abandonment) are still difficult to determine using the available data, but are a key area for future research. Additionally, even though tree cover gain is occurring in many places, it doesn’t “cancel out” the impacts of loss. Primary forests in particular serve as critical carbon stores and support an intricate network of wildlife, none of which can easily be replaced once lost.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  I don't know that getting more trees than you lost is a useful or effective measure against climate change. It's a good thing, certainly, but I imagine the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere requires more than a steady state of trees. I wonder how much of the world we'd need to cover with trees in order to offset our carbon production, certainly more than we've had during modern civilization.

mschuster91 2y ago

> Pan-tropical rainforests accounted for the biggest difference between previous estimates and the new figures, a finding that was corroborated by ground measurements, Gu said. The discovery suggests that rainforests are a more important natural carbon sink than previously estimated using satellite data. And yet, we stand by on the sidelines while narco, wood and cattle organized crime cartels contaminate, log and burn down the rainforests. IMHO, at least the endangered rainforest belts should be placed under international supervision with a joint military cooperative on a shoot-to-kill order against these kinds of criminals. Think of an UN Blue Helmets mission, but not as a toothless "peacekeper corps" like the usual useless bullshit. The very ability of Earth to provide for human life hinges to a significant part on the continued existence and health of the rainforest ecosystem, and it is obvious now that many of the countries in which these forests lie are fundamentally incapable of maintaining this shared resource.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

Maybe we should pay for working greening efforts - aka artifical algea blooms ontop of the Marianna trench. Iron, phosphates, Air pumps and light transmitted into the depths where the growthcube rises. Have a rainforest fall into the depths forever every hour.

thehappypm 2y ago
Every tech like this has unforeseen consequences. And they could be worse than the original problem.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  Every problem has unforeseen benefits. Global warming reduces the risk for nuclear winter when the resulting tribal conflicts lead to the nuclear regional exchange dice landing on that number that cant come up on repeated throws.
snowwrestler 2y ago
There are a lot of people who think humanity will intentionally geo-engineer our way out the negative effects of our accidental geo-engineering. In part because it is something active that a single nation could do for itself. Like, China could just decide one day to do what you’re saying and it’s unlikely anyone would start a war to stop them. Seems scary because we don’t actually know how to do it, and we only have one planet. We could create horrible side effects like killing ocean life we depend on for food, or admire (e.g. whales). We also have evidence for a “snowball Earth” state at times in the past. What if we overcorrect? Lots of good sci-fi stories about that to chill our bones. The argument against it happening is that it would be expensive for that one nation, but benefits would not be proprietary. Whereas building out an economy of low-carbon power generation, manufacturing, and transportation creates tons of domestic economic benefits like jobs, trade, profits.
- mzhaase 2y ago
  We have already geoengineered the temperature to be 0.2-0.4 C lower by container ships emitting SO2. We have also observed this a lot from volcanic eruptions. We should really at least try.

Prunkton 2y ago

>used new models and measurements to assess GPP from the land at 157 petagrams of carbon per year, up from an estimate of 120 petagrams established 40 years ago and currently used in most estimates of Earth’s carbon cycle >One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles. this sounds pretty significant. Any particular reason why it hasn't been updated for the last 40y?

baq 2y ago
Impressive, yes. Important? Absolutely. Significant? Not really. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

IvanK_net 2y ago

We could plant, cut down and burn trees for the energy, in a circle, and keep carbon levels in our atmosphere the same, instead of digging up new carbon from the ground and burning it. We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.

voisin 2y ago
> We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point. Location doesn’t matter. Duration of storage matters. If we could find a way to lock it up in a building material that would be effective and useful.
- gs17 2y ago
  It's not exactly turning CO2 into bricks, but there's a few applications of biochar as an additive to improve concrete, asphalt, particleboard, etc.
pjc50 2y ago
This consumes far more land area than we have available. The first blast furnaces were indeed fuelled this way, from locally sourced charcoal, but coal/coke took over due to requiring far less effort (energy!) to extract. Going by https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy/catchment-area-analyses/#definitions https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy... , the UK's single large scale biomass power plant is fuelled by over sixteen million hectares (160,000km^2) or approximately one Wisconsin. If we wanted to power the whole UK electricity from biomass, we'd need ten Wisconsins. (Wisconsin, presumably, would have to find some other source of power in this scenario) (of course, Drax wasn't built to burn imported biomass, it was built to burn locally extracted coal ...)
- OtherShrezzing 2y ago
  Drax uses about 12,000km^2, not 160,000km^2. A slightly more useful land area is the United Kingdom itself, which is 243,000km^2. With this technique, it takes an area 1/19th the size of the UK to produce 4% of its energy. This isn't a feasible approach to energy production, but it's an order of magnitude less bad than your figures have put forward.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

If trees are doing more work then we estimated in simulations, then good/bad, as we cut down forest we are doing more damage. But also, since trees do more work than we thought, then planting more will have bigger impact than past estimates.

highcountess 2y ago
That’s correct, but there is also something else, NASA has argued that their satellite imagery has shown an increase in the planet’s plant coverage as CO2 has increased, since to plants, CO2 is what not just oxygen is to us, but also in many ways like nourishment by absorbing the carbon from the air, which they use to grow.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Plants are generally not CO2 limited. General water is the limit - thus deserts are not very green despite having as much CO2. Even in wet climate a few weeks without rain and the plants are going dormant. In the ocean the limit is often other nutrients like iron. Attempts have been made to add iron to the ocean and those areas suddenly turned green (though it is not clear how sustainable this practice would be, nor if there might be other unknown negatives). That isn't to say CO2 is never the limit. Large greenhouses often are CO2 limited (often burning fossil fuels indoors to provide the CO2 without opening windows and thus letting something else undesired in). There are no doubt areas where CO2 is the limit and so NASA can see more green that is attributed to more CO2 - but still CO2 is rarely the limiting factor.
  - highcountess 2y ago
    This is a bunch of nonsense. Of course reduction in C02 can limit growth. You even make that very point by mentioning the use of CO2 generators in commercial greenhouse operations. The argument NASA makes is basically the same that CO2 increases have resulted in expected increases of plant growth, as is observable by satellite. I do not subscribe to the insane CO2 Bad religion that you appear to subscribe to because it is yet another dumb religion to harness the naive and gullible peasants, but you go right ahead. How about you stop being horrible to other people about it though and stop traveling and using technology that all produces CO2.

adamors 2y ago

Interesting that a couple of months ago there was an article which stated the exact opposite: > In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447 by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. > “We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September. > “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-c...

deleted 2y ago
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carrychains 2y ago
That's not the opposite. It's different context.
gvx 2y ago
Not exactly. The headline is a bit misleading imho: the article doesn't say that CO2 uptake by plants is up by 31%, rather that new estimates of the CO2 uptake by plants is 31% higher than previous estimates. That doesn't preclude a temporary collapse of carbon absorption (related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell).
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell Just trying to parse this - does that mean "a collapse in carbon absorption" actually means "more carbon was produced for the same amount of absorption"?
know-how 2y ago

Earw0rm 2y ago

It's a useful datapoint in understanding the Earth's carbon cycle, but that's all - and it in no way changes the fact that the sum total of current human activity is dragging that cycle out of equilibrium by about 2.5-3ppm per year, or 8-10%ish per decade.

werdnapk 2y ago

I thought I'd read in the past that an uptake in C02 for plants/trees (and therefore faster growing) results in a weaker structure which doesn't stand up to the environment as well as slower growing trees.

jiehong 2y ago

We know that soils seem to absorb less carbon as plant absorb more [0]. It's fascinating to see all those studies improving our limited understanding of the biosphere. [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03306-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03306-8

pjmlp 2y ago

Too bad we are currently too busy scaling up wars all over the place to bother with the planet state.

gitaarik 2y ago

> Plants the world over are absorbing about 31% more carbon dioxide than previously thought, according to a new assessment developed by scientists. So that means our supposed CO2 problem is 31% smaller than we previously thought?

Flozzin 2y ago
I would say no. We still have data on our year to year/decade to decade C02 in the atmosphere. So we can track how quickly it's rising. Those data points would already include any error we have in how much C02 is absorbed or created.
thehappypm 2y ago
Sadly not, because most carbon is absorbed by the ocean, not plants. And second because all of the nasty warming trends are still out there
- gitaarik 2y ago
  Or this statistic means that actually much more oxygen is converted by plants compared to being processed by the ocean? So it means planting extra plants to fight CO2 is much more effective than previously thought?
teamonkey 2y ago
No, the atmospheric CO2 measurements are unaffected by this. We definitely have a CO2 problem despite plants being more effective at extracting it than previously thought. Another way of looking at it is that planting trees may be more effective at removing CO2 than previously thought, and deforestation somewhat more harmful.
- gitaarik 2y ago
  Well, wouldn't it be correct to say that now, with the new numbers, CO2 uptake of plants will be 31% more than previously thought? So every coming year, there will be 31% more CO2 converted into oxygen than previously thought?

eggy 2y ago

If it has been underestimated then that means climate models have been using the bad, underestimated data, so they need to be updated and run to see where we are at, corrrect?

jeffbee 2y ago
No because we aren't reliant on a model of atmospheric CO2 concentration. We directly measure it.
- wiz21c 2y ago
  You measure the past, but you don't measure the future, right ?
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Right, this new estimate can be useful for decision support: if we plant X acres, how much CO2 would it absorb? It's not very important outside of that, and it cant have caused significant past errors because to date humans have not undertaken large-scale planting for CO2 absorption reasons.
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      >It's not very important outside of that, It's not very important outside of predicting the future of the climate accurately. That's not the kind of thing I'd write "It's not very important outside of" before. This "mere" prediction and decision support is the reason we fund the sciences.
    - eggy 2y ago
      Several countries have implemented large-scale planting efforts: China, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Australia, Pakistan, and Turkey to name a few. In 2019, Ethiopia claimed to have planted over 350 million trees in a single day as part of a broader initiative to plant 4 billion trees within a year to fight climate change.
- 2y ago

starlite-5008 2y ago

[dead]

know-how 2y ago

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myrmidon 2y ago

This is interesting to know, but easy to overstate IMO. Back of the envelope number is 10 kg of CO2 absorbed per maturing tree and year (for ~20 years). This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me, and a factor of 30% is not gonna change this significantly. Renewables + electrification seems much more realistic, when countries like France are already under 5 tons CO2/year/person by relying on carbon-free electricity (US is at 15!). But it's still nice to know because at least planting/conserving trees apparently helps even more than expected...

Someone 2y ago
> This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me That’s 50 trees each year for each person, or, in the USA, about 17 billion trees, for a total new forest of 340 billion trees. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/16/the-countries-of-the-world-ranked-by-their-tree-wealth https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... says the USA has about 280 billion trees, so we’d ‘only’ have to grow that by 120%. That would grow forest in the USA from about 33% to about 75% of land area. Infeasible, but not completely impossible, I would think, from a ‘could we do it?’ viewpoint. ‘Is there a decent chance we’ll do that?’ probably has the answer “no”, though. For the USA, I guess cutting combining forestation with decreasing energy usage would be the easier option.
- myrmidon 2y ago
  Thats an even bigger area than I imagined... Another big problem is that we'd have to grow those forests again after 20 years, because mature trees stop being a CO2 sink. The numbers/ratios should be even worse for Europe where the population density is higher. But I can totally see the approach working after scaling CO2 emissions down. I think going over single digit percentages of land area in forestation levels is already politically almost impossible-- agriculture alone is gonna meet any such attempt with ridicule at best and copious amounts of buckshot at worst...

deadbabe 2y ago

It feels like we can never catch a break. If we do something like underestimate the amount of CO2 plants absorb it still does nothing to change our fate. Is there anything in our climate models that if we got wrong would drastically reduce the estimated severity of long term impacts from climate?

thrance 2y ago
The trend is what it is, our models only allow us to explain why it is that way and what can be done about it.
akoboldfrying 2y ago
We don't ever actually know if any model is accurate -- that is, whether it actually models the underlying physical process. We just have a lot of models that have made predictions about the future that turned out to be more or less correct, much more often that you'd expect by chance, and so we develop trust in that correspondence with reality over time. It's possible that our current climate models are wrong, by a little or a lot. It's also possible that General Relativity is wrong -- gravity might stop at this time tomorrow. If you're interested, this issue is called the Problem of Induction in philosophy. (Confusingly, "induction" has a different meaning here than in mathematical induction.)

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Ah the greening earth FUD spread by big oil circa 2000s HN is playing all the greatest hits of denialism this week!

highwayman47 2y ago

CO2 is food for plants

ben_w 2y ago
And also a poison for them — just as oxygen is both of those things for us. (If oxygen isn't even a metaphorical food for us, then neither is CO2 for plants). Unfortunately, "food" is more complex than "how much carbohydrates do you get per day?"
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  We still have ways to go to that. From the current 400 ppm to about 2000ppm before the apocalypse. Until then the yields will generally improve from today’s baseline. There might be other systems that break before that and we get plantocalypse earlier
timeon 2y ago
And your point is?
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago
  Apparently the more of it there is, the more they eat. It's called "an implication", or "logical consequence".

newsclues 2y ago

So perhaps the alarmist climate models were incorrect and most be corrected before they are used to shape public policy?

bradjohnson 2y ago
No. This changes nothing about climate models.

Terr_ 2y ago

Unfortunately this doesn't mean much for the practical problem, because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots. It's like we've got a bathtub where the water level is rising, because we won't turn off the tap and the drain is only so big. We can lower the apparent water-level by throwing in a bunch of plant-sponges, but we can't just keep adding more indefinitely.

akoboldfrying 2y ago
>because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots. If that's true, there would seem to be no benefit to the climate in preserving or regenerating forests.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Correct, in the long-term. Like how a temporary loan is somewhat wasted if the breathing-room it generates is only used to delay fixing the budget shortfall. https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/why-temporary-carbon-storage-in-forests-has-little-climate-value-part-1/ https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/why-tempora...
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    Thanks for responding. I think the part of the page you linked that is relevant to this topic is: >But when forest carbon is released—which could happen when trees die in a changing climate, or when short-term carbon offset contracts expire and allow landowners to clear their forests—temperatures inevitably go up. The first part ("when trees die in a changing climate") links to a National Geographic article behind a paywall. Before the paywall appeared, I noticed it said something about "drought or fire", which leads me to wonder whether the loss of forest carbon occurs only under those conditions. Is that right? If so, by avoiding those conditions, we coughs avoid that loss.

narrator 2y ago

Ok guys, this climate change stuff is temporarily off the menu until we win the great power AI war with China. Same goes for nuclear power. Send the memo out that we love nuclear power now after 40 years of hating it.[1] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/96aa8d1a-bbf1-4b35-8680-d1fef36ef067 https://www.ft.com/content/96aa8d1a-bbf1-4b35-8680-d1fef36ef...

thrance 2y ago
Climate change stuff is off the menu until Americans elect a president that actually believes in climate change. There is no "power AI war with China", this is just another pretext from the GOP to fuel the extraction industry with public money, and "drill, baby, drill".
- narrator 2y ago
  What about the nuclear power stuff though? That was a Biden initiative and a huge reversal of the past 40 years of Democratic Party policy. Just seems like things are moving in energy policy.
  - thrance 2y ago
    It's too little, too late, but I'll still take it. However I still have a hard time believing banks and other private actors will go through funding 20+ years projects like nuclear reactors in today's short-termist economy.

casenmgreen 2y ago

This kind of change is deeply worrying, because on the face of it, it implies means estimates of climate change are potentially rather unsound - such large changes in mechanisms central to change - and so climate change could be much worse than we expect. If climate change isn't so bad, then phew, but if it's actually worse, then we are in even more deadly trouble than we already are.

muth02446 2y ago

What does that mean for all the existing simulations that use the "wrong" values? BTW: are there any open source climate models/simulations?