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Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. Clearly i

Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 14y ago
> Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a [. . .] Because of the wealth of evidence that tells us otherwise. > can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. 'absorbing shocks' and 'supporting life' doesn't mean 'supporting human life comfortably'. I don't understand the outrage about climate change, since reducing co2 emissions is mostly about being more energy efficient. How is that a terrible thing? My parents lived through 'Pea Soupers'[1] (a 4 day fog killed 4,000 people in London); we've seen the effects of gridlock and poor public transport; working on better solutions before the billions of China and India need a gas-guzzling car each doesn't feel like having any downsides. [1] (http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.html http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.h...)
- marknutter 14y ago
  There's nothing wrong with wanting to be energy efficient but when that means telling developing nations like China and India that they are not allowed to burn as many fossil fuels as developed nations did when they were developing you're likely to get some pushback. The only feasible solution to the problem is to find energy sources that produce at or above the levels the world requires today, but does so in a clean way. The only one that comes to mind for me is nuclear power.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    I agree that geo-political realities make any global coordinated attempts to alter real inputs to various climate models unfeasible. As long as people want to see their children grow up to prosper, they won't want to sacrifice for a foreigner's objective. It is the same principle that has caused indolent civilizations to fall to foreign aggressors, the one that doesn't follow the pattern wins. And not everyone will believe the enlightened creed of less is better.
- paganel 14y ago
  > absorbing shocks' and 'supporting life' doesn't mean 'supporting human life comfortably'. And why do we think of ourselves as being superior to other past species? I generally don't like metaphors, but I remember reading somewhere (there were also a couple of animated representations in support) that we're more like a virus that has infected the Earth (its ecosystem etc.). Looking at it through those lenses we have a couple of options left open until the host (Earth's ecosystem) ends up changing in such a way that will eliminate us. We can slow down the rate of infection by lowering our numbers or at least our growth rate. This has already started happening by itself in the more "advanced" countries. It will probably also happen in the rest of world at some point. Or we can keep our numbers and numerical growth-rate but we'll need to start inflicting lesser and lesser pain on our host. Realistically, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Or we can increase our efforts in finding a new host, or at least a "disease transmitter" (or whatever the scientific term is) that will carry and support us until we stumble upon a host similar to Earth. Let's say a space-ship or something of the sorts. I know this looks too much like science-fiction right now, but if we're serious about our long-term survival as a species we need to start looking at it that way.
  - maxharris 14y ago
    And why do we think of ourselves as being superior to other past species? On superiority: other species don't have a conceptual view of the world. Every other species can't read and understand your argument, let alone refute it. This has ramifications on a political level: In order to have individual rights, you have to be capable of understanding what individual rights are. Imagine the ridiculous spectacle of taking a bear to court for mauling another animal, or a person. What it comes down to is this: I want to live. Not just to metabolize and take up space like other animals do, but to live a full human life. That means having a huge impact on animals, no matter what I do (short of suicide). Even if I didn't eat meat, there are plenty of things that are crucial for human life (everything from agriculture to medical progress to displacing animals to make way for cities and factories). The choice is clear: either humans are first, or they don't live distinctly human lives at all. I am a human being, and I take pride in that fact. Because I am a human being, I can create art, write software, further our knowledge of the world through science, enjoy literature, and a whole host of other things that no member of any other species (currently known) will ever do.
- kgmpers 14y ago
  This is the thing I've never understood. Building a house that doesn't need to spend as much energy(money) heating and cooling is a better house. Just the same as a toilet that uses less water to flush is a better toilet. These aren't part of a UN plot to control your life, it's just a smart decision. Secondly, regardless of what someone might think of climate change, you can't get around the fact that the Earth doesn't have infinite resources and is neither an infinite wastebasket. Something has to change about with how we do business to fix that fundamental issue.
  - beeffective 14y ago
    The regulations and fees around building a house are ridiculous in California. I would love to build a house of my dreams, which would be about 1500sq ft, big garage, on 1+ acre and energy efficient. I could easily afford to buy the improved land in Northern California with cash right now (1-5 acres). But there is one problem, the local governments have made that impossible unless I'm rich. It's $60k+ just to break ground on a piece of land that already has a building pad, water meter and electricity, all due to fees. The Department of Transportation mitigation fee is $37k alone. I'm not sure if these are liberal or conservative policies, tighter regulations due to unions, or environmental regulations (see SF Bay Area regulations in Contra Costa county - sorry no source). So in the mean time, my only choice of buying my first home is some piece of shit stucko house in the suburbs.
criley 14y ago
>"It has supported life for millions of years. Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe. This is a bit shortsighted, I think. It has supported life, yes, but it has not supported CIVILIZATION for millions of years. Many hypothesize that human civilization, specifically our population size, would be completely and totally unsustainable with even a minor climate change. Sure -- Earth would be fine! Life would be fine! Heck, we'd likely trigger what we would call an extinction event, but life would recover. Humanity and civilization however are absolutely dependent on a narrow range of climate for our agriculture. Them's the facts. If temperatures rise even 10° average, then about the majority of human population centers will be underwater and agriculture as we know it (the plants we're used to eating in bulk) are no longer feasible in the quantity or quality we expect. Those temperatures were seen in the Jurassic, and Earth and life were fine! But I do not think human civilization would be a fraction of what it is under those totally natural circumstances. So sure. Life will be fine. Humanity could be on the brink, though.
- kpierre 14y ago
  > agriculture as we know it (the plants we're used to eating in bulk) are no longer feasible in the quantity or quality we expect. of course everyone will have to move, but isn't there a huge amount of land that will become good for agriculture, e.g. siberia, northern america, maybe even some of antarctica?
  - martythemaniak 14y ago
    Here's the crux of the argument - all the resources (time, money, energy, social costs, possible wars etc) that would be spent adjusting to climate change could instead be spent on productive uses. The costs of being energy efficient today outweight the possible risks from having to pay for the consequences.
    - criley 14y ago
      Also: those that have the resources to adjust to climate change ARE NOT the same as those who feel the heaviest weight of the stresses of drought, violent storms, water access, etc. Those with the most resources are also the least likely to be politically instabilized by the effects of climate change. So you have a mismatch of effort: those who can don't have an incentive to fix the problem for those who can't. (Or have a counter-incentive: I'm reminded of the anti-monsanto anti-gmo fad in the USA -- despite the fact that GMO foods are our best weapon in producing drought resistant crops for regions most heavily affected by those problems!)
bane 14y ago
A climate of some form will always exist. Both Mars and Venus have climates. The question is will the steady state of any change in Earth's climate result in one that is favorable for humans? That's the crux of the problem. Most likely humans will survive, but large investments in infrastructure and civilization in general made across millenia could be irreparably damaged. Shifting away from thousands of years old population centers (and the associated shifts in supporting infrastructure like farms and logistics) would not be an easy thing.
sopooneo 14y ago
Does the Earth's having supported life for millions of years support the idea that our CO2 emissions are not a problem? I want to see all angles here, so is there something I'm missing? Are there cases where volcanoes were spewing out CO2 at a similar rate and ocean levels did not rise by amounts that would have been bad for humans, or plant and animal species did not go extinct in a way that would have been bad for humans?
- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  While there may be other angles, I believe what you're replying to here is an invalid assumption regarding what "absorb shocks" and "stable system" mean and imply. The GP seems to believe that the Earth's climate will simply revert to whatever was convenient for life while failing to understand that there's no reason to assume disruptive large-scale chemical changes in the environment can't or won't result in a new equilibrium that's inhospitable to life as it evolved for conditions present before such an event or series of events.
3am 14y ago
Hey, I'm going to call you out on, "Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe." What do you mean? Do you mean that you think the Earth's temperature will not rise as fast as climatologist consensus? Or that the affects wouldn't be as bad as consensus predictions? If it's the latter, I'd love to know where you got the data (surveys of 'typical' climatologist community?) or if it's just a general impression of yours.
moultano 14y ago
Earth has wiped out most of the species on it many times due to volcanism induced global warming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event
btilly 14y ago
Of course the Earth can absorb shocks - it has a feedback loop. However what happens when you push on a feedback loop? It absorbs some, and moves some. The whole article is about how different ways of estimating that feedback process leads to different estimates of how much it moves in response to force. The upper and lower estimates point to different numbers, but are in general agreement. Each produces numbers in the uncertainty range of the other, and both agree that global warming is real. If you read any of this as evidence against global warming, you've misunderstood the article. Go back and read it again. Just because we don't know the exact response, doesn't mean that there isn't a significant one.
- underdown 14y ago
  it does however mean that the estimates put forth by scientists are pretty flimsy.
  - jbooth 14y ago
    What's flimsy specifically? That global temperature is going up? I think that's pretty well-established. You can look at the graphs, you can look at the record ice melt we get each summer, and if you really want to get scary, figure out how much higher the temp increase would be if a lot of that energy wasn't captured by the phase change of the ice melts. That the greenhouse effect exists? You can model that with 400-year-old physics.
rayiner 14y ago
The question isn't whether Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions. The Earth will be fine--it'll just move to a different equilibrium. The question is whether we will be able to absorb those changes. During the last ice age, the average temperature of the Earth was only 5C cooler than today. Life survived just fine. Indeed, humans survived just fine. But that 5C difference meant Chicago was under miles of ice. Look at what happened to Japan because of one tiny hurricane. We think of ourself as resilient because of our technology, but that comes from watching to much Sci-Fi. In reality even very small changes in the Earth's equilibrium could cause serous pain. Especially economically. Look at how painful the Great Recession has been in the U.S. That was with a financial shock that merely caused GDP to decline 4%.
scott_s 14y ago
Because science is not based on intuitive feelings about how things may work, but on theories which try to explain how they actually work. It's not enough to have a nebulous idea like "the Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks." You need a model that describes exactly that, and then you need to see if the data agrees with that model.
sageikosa 14y ago
I usually try to dissuade myself from using global-scale abstractions, such as calling the Earth a "system". After that, the idea that any part of the verifiable models we throw in the Earth-systems bucket is particularly stable is frankly unrealistic. That off my chest, I would also think that the global-scale political institutions are not nearly stable enough, nor will they ever be, to sustain a global effort to alter mass-behavior in such a way to consciously control the environment either for the good of all life on earth (whatever that may be), or for the "future of humanity": depending on whose book of revelations one chooses to follow for planning humanities future.
jellicle 14y ago
Nobody has said the Earth will become barren of life.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

DanBC 14y ago

> Why is it so hard to believe that the Earth is a [. . .] Because of the wealth of evidence that tells us otherwise. > can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions? It has supported life for millions of years. 'absorbing shocks' and 'supporting life' doesn't mean 'supporting human life comfortably'. I don't understand the outrage about climate change, since reducing co2 emissions is mostly about being more energy efficient. How is that a terrible thing? My parents lived through 'Pea Soupers'[1] (a 4 day fog killed 4,000 people in London); we've seen the effects of gridlock and poor public transport; working on better solutions before the billions of China and India need a gas-guzzling car each doesn't feel like having any downsides. [1] (http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.html http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/perspect/london.h...)

marknutter 14y ago
There's nothing wrong with wanting to be energy efficient but when that means telling developing nations like China and India that they are not allowed to burn as many fossil fuels as developed nations did when they were developing you're likely to get some pushback. The only feasible solution to the problem is to find energy sources that produce at or above the levels the world requires today, but does so in a clean way. The only one that comes to mind for me is nuclear power.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  I agree that geo-political realities make any global coordinated attempts to alter real inputs to various climate models unfeasible. As long as people want to see their children grow up to prosper, they won't want to sacrifice for a foreigner's objective. It is the same principle that has caused indolent civilizations to fall to foreign aggressors, the one that doesn't follow the pattern wins. And not everyone will believe the enlightened creed of less is better.
paganel 14y ago
> absorbing shocks' and 'supporting life' doesn't mean 'supporting human life comfortably'. And why do we think of ourselves as being superior to other past species? I generally don't like metaphors, but I remember reading somewhere (there were also a couple of animated representations in support) that we're more like a virus that has infected the Earth (its ecosystem etc.). Looking at it through those lenses we have a couple of options left open until the host (Earth's ecosystem) ends up changing in such a way that will eliminate us. We can slow down the rate of infection by lowering our numbers or at least our growth rate. This has already started happening by itself in the more "advanced" countries. It will probably also happen in the rest of world at some point. Or we can keep our numbers and numerical growth-rate but we'll need to start inflicting lesser and lesser pain on our host. Realistically, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Or we can increase our efforts in finding a new host, or at least a "disease transmitter" (or whatever the scientific term is) that will carry and support us until we stumble upon a host similar to Earth. Let's say a space-ship or something of the sorts. I know this looks too much like science-fiction right now, but if we're serious about our long-term survival as a species we need to start looking at it that way.
- maxharris 14y ago
  And why do we think of ourselves as being superior to other past species? On superiority: other species don't have a conceptual view of the world. Every other species can't read and understand your argument, let alone refute it. This has ramifications on a political level: In order to have individual rights, you have to be capable of understanding what individual rights are. Imagine the ridiculous spectacle of taking a bear to court for mauling another animal, or a person. What it comes down to is this: I want to live. Not just to metabolize and take up space like other animals do, but to live a full human life. That means having a huge impact on animals, no matter what I do (short of suicide). Even if I didn't eat meat, there are plenty of things that are crucial for human life (everything from agriculture to medical progress to displacing animals to make way for cities and factories). The choice is clear: either humans are first, or they don't live distinctly human lives at all. I am a human being, and I take pride in that fact. Because I am a human being, I can create art, write software, further our knowledge of the world through science, enjoy literature, and a whole host of other things that no member of any other species (currently known) will ever do.
kgmpers 14y ago
This is the thing I've never understood. Building a house that doesn't need to spend as much energy(money) heating and cooling is a better house. Just the same as a toilet that uses less water to flush is a better toilet. These aren't part of a UN plot to control your life, it's just a smart decision. Secondly, regardless of what someone might think of climate change, you can't get around the fact that the Earth doesn't have infinite resources and is neither an infinite wastebasket. Something has to change about with how we do business to fix that fundamental issue.
- beeffective 14y ago
  The regulations and fees around building a house are ridiculous in California. I would love to build a house of my dreams, which would be about 1500sq ft, big garage, on 1+ acre and energy efficient. I could easily afford to buy the improved land in Northern California with cash right now (1-5 acres). But there is one problem, the local governments have made that impossible unless I'm rich. It's $60k+ just to break ground on a piece of land that already has a building pad, water meter and electricity, all due to fees. The Department of Transportation mitigation fee is $37k alone. I'm not sure if these are liberal or conservative policies, tighter regulations due to unions, or environmental regulations (see SF Bay Area regulations in Contra Costa county - sorry no source). So in the mean time, my only choice of buying my first home is some piece of shit stucko house in the suburbs.

criley 14y ago

>"It has supported life for millions of years. Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe. This is a bit shortsighted, I think. It has supported life, yes, but it has not supported CIVILIZATION for millions of years. Many hypothesize that human civilization, specifically our population size, would be completely and totally unsustainable with even a minor climate change. Sure -- Earth would be fine! Life would be fine! Heck, we'd likely trigger what we would call an extinction event, but life would recover. Humanity and civilization however are absolutely dependent on a narrow range of climate for our agriculture. Them's the facts. If temperatures rise even 10° average, then about the majority of human population centers will be underwater and agriculture as we know it (the plants we're used to eating in bulk) are no longer feasible in the quantity or quality we expect. Those temperatures were seen in the Jurassic, and Earth and life were fine! But I do not think human civilization would be a fraction of what it is under those totally natural circumstances. So sure. Life will be fine. Humanity could be on the brink, though.

kpierre 14y ago
> agriculture as we know it (the plants we're used to eating in bulk) are no longer feasible in the quantity or quality we expect. of course everyone will have to move, but isn't there a huge amount of land that will become good for agriculture, e.g. siberia, northern america, maybe even some of antarctica?
- martythemaniak 14y ago
  Here's the crux of the argument - all the resources (time, money, energy, social costs, possible wars etc) that would be spent adjusting to climate change could instead be spent on productive uses. The costs of being energy efficient today outweight the possible risks from having to pay for the consequences.
  - criley 14y ago
    Also: those that have the resources to adjust to climate change ARE NOT the same as those who feel the heaviest weight of the stresses of drought, violent storms, water access, etc. Those with the most resources are also the least likely to be politically instabilized by the effects of climate change. So you have a mismatch of effort: those who can don't have an incentive to fix the problem for those who can't. (Or have a counter-incentive: I'm reminded of the anti-monsanto anti-gmo fad in the USA -- despite the fact that GMO foods are our best weapon in producing drought resistant crops for regions most heavily affected by those problems!)

bane 14y ago

A climate of some form will always exist. Both Mars and Venus have climates. The question is will the steady state of any change in Earth's climate result in one that is favorable for humans? That's the crux of the problem. Most likely humans will survive, but large investments in infrastructure and civilization in general made across millenia could be irreparably damaged. Shifting away from thousands of years old population centers (and the associated shifts in supporting infrastructure like farms and logistics) would not be an easy thing.

sopooneo 14y ago

Does the Earth's having supported life for millions of years support the idea that our CO2 emissions are not a problem? I want to see all angles here, so is there something I'm missing? Are there cases where volcanoes were spewing out CO2 at a similar rate and ocean levels did not rise by amounts that would have been bad for humans, or plant and animal species did not go extinct in a way that would have been bad for humans?

obviouslygreen 14y ago
While there may be other angles, I believe what you're replying to here is an invalid assumption regarding what "absorb shocks" and "stable system" mean and imply. The GP seems to believe that the Earth's climate will simply revert to whatever was convenient for life while failing to understand that there's no reason to assume disruptive large-scale chemical changes in the environment can't or won't result in a new equilibrium that's inhospitable to life as it evolved for conditions present before such an event or series of events.

3am 14y ago

Hey, I'm going to call you out on, "Clearly it is not as brittle as the typical climate scientist would have us believe." What do you mean? Do you mean that you think the Earth's temperature will not rise as fast as climatologist consensus? Or that the affects wouldn't be as bad as consensus predictions? If it's the latter, I'd love to know where you got the data (surveys of 'typical' climatologist community?) or if it's just a general impression of yours.

moultano 14y ago

Earth has wiped out most of the species on it many times due to volcanism induced global warming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

btilly 14y ago

Of course the Earth can absorb shocks - it has a feedback loop. However what happens when you push on a feedback loop? It absorbs some, and moves some. The whole article is about how different ways of estimating that feedback process leads to different estimates of how much it moves in response to force. The upper and lower estimates point to different numbers, but are in general agreement. Each produces numbers in the uncertainty range of the other, and both agree that global warming is real. If you read any of this as evidence against global warming, you've misunderstood the article. Go back and read it again. Just because we don't know the exact response, doesn't mean that there isn't a significant one.

underdown 14y ago
it does however mean that the estimates put forth by scientists are pretty flimsy.
- jbooth 14y ago
  What's flimsy specifically? That global temperature is going up? I think that's pretty well-established. You can look at the graphs, you can look at the record ice melt we get each summer, and if you really want to get scary, figure out how much higher the temp increase would be if a lot of that energy wasn't captured by the phase change of the ice melts. That the greenhouse effect exists? You can model that with 400-year-old physics.

rayiner 14y ago

The question isn't whether Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks like CO2 emissions. The Earth will be fine--it'll just move to a different equilibrium. The question is whether we will be able to absorb those changes. During the last ice age, the average temperature of the Earth was only 5C cooler than today. Life survived just fine. Indeed, humans survived just fine. But that 5C difference meant Chicago was under miles of ice. Look at what happened to Japan because of one tiny hurricane. We think of ourself as resilient because of our technology, but that comes from watching to much Sci-Fi. In reality even very small changes in the Earth's equilibrium could cause serous pain. Especially economically. Look at how painful the Great Recession has been in the U.S. That was with a financial shock that merely caused GDP to decline 4%.

scott_s 14y ago

Because science is not based on intuitive feelings about how things may work, but on theories which try to explain how they actually work. It's not enough to have a nebulous idea like "the Earth is a stable system that can absorb shocks." You need a model that describes exactly that, and then you need to see if the data agrees with that model.

sageikosa 14y ago

I usually try to dissuade myself from using global-scale abstractions, such as calling the Earth a "system". After that, the idea that any part of the verifiable models we throw in the Earth-systems bucket is particularly stable is frankly unrealistic. That off my chest, I would also think that the global-scale political institutions are not nearly stable enough, nor will they ever be, to sustain a global effort to alter mass-behavior in such a way to consciously control the environment either for the good of all life on earth (whatever that may be), or for the "future of humanity": depending on whose book of revelations one chooses to follow for planning humanities future.

jellicle 14y ago

Nobody has said the Earth will become barren of life.