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The biggest thing nature did to fight climate change is no longer working
- m3rv 13y agoYou can pay to All Gore and others to have a false, but good feelings. It's just another propaganda to get You under control... Free society is "no good" for some people. Hey, check this out:http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/07aug_southpole/ http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/07... And send All Gore there to introduce Global Climate Tax for Mars!
- jjindev 13y agoThe simplest observation is that the Mauna Loa data series for atmospheric CO2 has been very consistent and shows a steeper curve over time. That simply must be net-net all of the environmental changes going on around the world. Really based on that data set no one should have ever hoped that "the plants could keep up," because they never have. That is not in the record. As an aside, and for the HN audience, boy ... "long read" pages that require the mouse to be mid screen for the scroll wheel to work are really pretty annoying.
- gngeal 13y ago"The biggest thing nature did to fight climate change..." ...has always been the absorption of CO2 in the rocks of the Earth's crust. Or hasn't it? Well, this process is still working, but it won't be working for long, since there's almost no CO2 to absorb anymore.
- loceng 13y agoSeems we're creating conditions to revert things to before the tipping point was reached - what it looks like before the tipping point, I'm sure someone has a more educated guess than not..
- davidvaughan 13y agoPossibly on the plus side, increasing concentration of CO2 may be encouraging the growth of vegetation in previously bare regions. "Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstrac...
- motters 13y agoThe amount of CO2 being absorbed by plants is far less than the rate at which it is accumulating within the atmosphere. You can get a good idea of how much CO2 is absorbed by looking at the seasonal variation in atmospheric CO2. https://github.com/fuzzgun/ccg https://github.com/fuzzgun/ccg
- Gravityloss 13y agohttp://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2 http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2 This is a better graph.
- agilebyte 13y agoWhat is the net planetary gain? Do the previously almost bare regions turn to totally bare at a slower rate?
- negamax 13y agoUmm.. nature's goal is not to sustain human life. It's our goal. If we screw up the planet, we literally will be screwing ourselves. Earth doesn't need us. It will reset in few million years by earthquakes and volcanoes and go again for better life.
- sgwooduk 13y agoThe Revenge of Gaia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
- negamax 13y agoRevenge insinuates vindication for our actions by Earth. But Earth don't care. I like to think of it as a giant and complex spaceship rather than a living being.
- saraid216 13y agoI think you might be looking for this instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoEarth climate was never stable or unchanging. So nature certainly don't fight climate change.
- luikore 13y agoWe still don't have any proof of earth having consciousness. Even if it has, it's probably not thinking in a human way... Do you really think it has the same definition of "screw up" as we do? Maybe earth thinks forests are itchy and hopes human beings to chop down all of them...
- negamax 13y agoActually, I am suggesting exactly the opposite of what you have interpreted.
- oneandoneis2 13y agoI call BS on this article. Tropical forests do next to nothing for global carbon fixation - they're about as far as you can get from "the biggest thing nature did" Ocean plankton is by far the most important place for carbon sequestration.
- StavrosK 13y agoIce caps melting -> more ocean -> more plankton -> less CO2. The problem practically fixes itself!
- jonsen 13y agoIce caps melting -> more ocean depth more ocean surface -> more plankton
- maratd 13y agoWell, technically, if the ocean level rises, you will end up with more surface.
- StavrosK 13y agoEspecially since current land mass will be turned into sea. I was joking, though.
- Gravityloss 13y agoBut the ocean absorbs a much larger portion of sunlight than the average land. Hence more energy absorbed if there's more ocean. And that leads to more heating. Maybe something like boreal forests work best. But large carbon sinks like from the carboniferous era (coal and oil deposits) can't happen anymore anyway since fungi have evolved to break down wood.
- Dewie 13y agoIsn't there a lot of land that is only a few meters above sea level (where a lot of humans like to live)? Say you have a valley and a river has been transporting down matter for a long time, forming a flat landscape at the bottom of the valley, only a few meters above sea level. If the sea rises only a few meters, this valley will be flooded easily, and there will be a lot of new surface area per cubic unit of water, in other words a lot of surface area for new plankton. A pity about the humans that probably lived in that valley, though. ;)
- crazytony 13y agoI wonder what the biochemistry behind this would be? Maybe the plants create carbon structures more efficiently at higher temps?
- stiff 13y agoOne of the biggest problem humanity currently has in general is that morality only kicks-in in most people when there is a very direct link between their actions and some negative consequences. Once there is enough degrees of separation and abstraction nobody cares anymore. Most people would not slaughter an animal without really having to do it, but once it becomes a cheeseburger or a fur clothing nobody gives it a second thought. The problem is that the world of human affairs is getting more and more abstract as we specialize more and more and develop more complex technology, so more and more things get affected by this. It is especially sad given that sometimes sacrificing a small convenience for one person would be able to make a huge change in somebody else's life. But again, once there are enough degrees of separation, we do not feel "in position" to help and we do not view it as our problem to do it.
- saraid216 13y agoThis would have made more sense if your example wasn't one so painfully biased in presentism. Animal slaughter was sort of a commonplace until we industrialized it; people weren't squeamish about it until the last few hundred years. Being squeamish is a status marker.
- mayanksinghal 13y agoWell, if by few hundred years you mean at least ~2.2 millenia then yes, because Buddhism's dont-take-life preaching is at least that old. And since when did the ethics and normalities of past become the standards by which our present should be governed? If animal slaughter is alright because it was okay a few hundred years ago then slavery, child marriage and hundred other nonsensical stuff should be alright as well. What we do now should be determined by how our society feels now and how it wants to invest in the future. Arguing that that our present actions should be governed by medieval ethics is lazy.
- saraid216 13y agoUm. I didn't make a value judgement on animal slaughter. I said he picked an ineffective example.
- tankenmate 13y ago“When they get warmer than average, forests in the tropics do not like it, and overall they tend to put more CO2 into the atmosphere than they take out,” says study co-author Pep Canadell, executive officer of the Global Carbon Project. This particular statement strikes me as spin; if forests were producing more CO2 than they were consuming then by the necessities of chemistry the plants would start to die due to lack of sustenance (sugars, including cellulose, which are made from CO2 and photosynthesis). Either the forest gets to a homeostasis, it start to expand, or it dies back vis a vis the partial derivative of impact of CO2 levels. If indeed the CO2 levels being produced are more than consumption then where are the plants getting their energy from? And don't say animals, because if that was the case then the animals would have to be eating more and more of the forests. The only case I can see is wide scale felling, but then wide scale felling is not a case of plants producing more CO2. CO2 levels are a problem, but this short description of this report seems to be muddying the waters not making them more clear.
- michaelwww 13y ago"Other important biophysical changes alter the amount of water that evaporates or transpires from plants and the soil, the roughness or unevenness of the plant canopy, and ultimately the extent of convective clouds and rainfall." I think the author misreads the referenced science reports, in which it seems to me they are suggesting the forest becomes less of a carbon sink as it gets warmer. http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Canadell_2010_Interactions%20of%20carbon%20cycle-human%20activity-climate%20-%20Research%20Portfolio.COSUST.pdf http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Canadell_2010_...
- beedogs 13y agoThe next "biggest thing" nature will do will be population collapse.
- altero 13y agoOne thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. Just two hundred years ago there was Little Ace Age and river Thames would freeze every winter. Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade. Yet somehow it is 110% sure that our CO2 emissions are responsible for global warming. It is even crime to disagree with scientific hypotheses. And governments will happily `solve` this problem by taking away our rights. F*k this. We should be solving other problems than cow farts; Urbanization, slums, fusion, wealth distribution...
- phaemon 13y ago> One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. The current population of Greenland is about 56,300 with 15,400 living in the capital, Nuuk. Animals are kept and crops grown. So it's hardly shocking that the same was happening 1000 years ago.
- singingfish 13y agoThis is a bullshit climate denier argument. http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.h...
- jon_smark 13y ago> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade. Funny, the scientific consensus is that on average, on any given year vulcano emissions represent only about 1% of human emissions [1]. I would very much like to know where you got your numbers. It's very likely that you are being misled. [1] http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming...
- tomjakubowski 13y ago> One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. Just two hundred years ago there was Little Ace Age and river Thames would freeze every winter. One fairly well-supported theory of the cause of the Little Ice Age is that reforestation that due to a decline in Eurasian and American human populations led to an uptake in CO2 absorption [1] [2]. This suggests that at least partially anthropogenic climate change is a phenomenon which existed even before the Industrial Revolution. In any case, > Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade. No [3]. Moreover, volcanic eruptions tend to have an overall dimming effect due to their release of sulfur-containing compounds which form sulfuric acid aerosol. There have even been some radical/crackpot geoengineering proposals to release sulfur into the atmosphere to combat global warming [4]. 1: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/EI157.1 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/EI157.1 2: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/06/11/0959683611404578.abstract http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/06/11/095968361140... 3: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming-intermediate.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming... 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_(geoengineering) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_...
- Grue3 13y agoBecause the nature did so well to fight climate change before. You know, mass extinctions, ice ages...
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI'm looking forward positively on the perspective of all-year seaside resorts of Barentz see.
- ommunist 13y agoDid volcanoes stopped everywhere? This is single most inadequate topic in my news feed today. Climate is always changing. And it is the Sun and the Earth's core which are the most powerful drivers of it. Did the Sun stopped shining?
- ommunist 13y agoThere is no global warming. Period. Humans are not geological force. Period. living organisms mass= 6,57×10^18g humanity mass = 2,27×10^14g total biosphere mass = 5,2×10^25g Humans are not geological factor, I am afraid. Globally plants and CO2 concentrations are in homeostatic relationship. Forest ecosystems of the temperate zone are very (very-very) resilient to average temperature changes. What you really have to be afraid of is the new Ice Age. It happens regularly and suddenly.