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The scariest part of the slow trend of global warming is that maybe big positive feedback mechanisms could be literally hidden under our feets, pretty much igno

The scariest part of the slow trend of global warming is that maybe big positive feedback mechanisms could be literally hidden under our feets, pretty much ignored till now. Things could go wrong very fast, in ways that not even experts could had predicted.

projectileboy 12y ago
You mess with a nonlinear system, you get nonlinear results.
- 1971genocide 12y ago
  haha, i have been saying people this thing to people for years. the climate is non-linear which means slight changes can result in bifurcations that are irreversible. When we lose all our mathematical models we lose our understanding and once that happens we are no different from cavemens who dont understand how fire works.
jobu 12y ago
What I'm curious about is the mechanisms that might counteract global warming. The earth has cycled in the past between hot and cold periods, so there are obviously natural mechanisms that cause it to reverse as well. Could we harness these mechanisms to keep the earth compatible with human habitation?
- dflock 12y ago
  I think that this mechanism is mostly CO2 being slowly weathered out of the atmosphere and disposed of, mostly via limestone formation. This takes a very long time and is very slow, so it can only catch up if you stop pumping it out.
  - agapos 12y ago
    The colder oceans are notable natural CO2 absorbents, plus we have to mention the effects of life itself: photo-synthesizing plants and unicellular creatures. Like the historical ones that fixated enough carbon to create today's wast coal, oil and methane fields. As I recall, there is a group of creatures that may did the first big wave of carbon fixation at the beginning of life, binding CO2 and releasing the important O2 that enabled the appearance of complex life forms, but I can't remember it's name.
    - dflock 12y ago
      Algae, or Green/blue Algae, more specifically.
- tim333 12y ago
  The earth has sometimes been cooled by volcanoes putting stuff in the atmosphere and that could be simulated by pumping sulphur dioxide though whether its a good idea is dubious. Funnily enough the present man made warming may actually help keep the earth compatible with human habitation as there are arguments it may head in to another ice age otherwise.
- madaxe_again 12y ago
  Well, the main feedback mechanism that I can see being a major influence in the beginning chaos is that of albedo. In short, atmospheric warming causes more water vapour higher in the atmosphere, causing higher and denser clouds - which will reflect most light and energy and prevent it from reaching the surface. This in turn could cause snow and ice cover on the ground, due to lowered surface temperatures, which would feed further into a cooling system. You'd expect to see this effect most prominently in continental rain shadow areas, particularly at altitude. Frankly, the outcome is unknowable, there are too many variables, both known and unknown. The only element which does seem inevitable is that there will be major changes to human civilisation. Oh - one thought I did have was blanketing the Arctic in artificial icebergs - just big white floating plastic platforms, millions of them.
benihana 12y ago
This exact thing (with methane) has happened before and it is believed to be the cause of the extinction of extinctions, the PT event. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- jfoster 12y ago
  If methane makes it into all of our water, can we defend against that? Can we filter it out? I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    > If methane makes it into all of our water It won't, methane doesn't "want" to mix with water anyway, at normal pressures and temperatures any dissolved methane will start to bubble out and float away. > Can we filter it out? It leaves on its own. Most of the time when you're concerned about methane in the water, it's because the water is being pumped up from underground where they were trapped together. The main risk there is explosions or fires if your equipment doesn't bleed off the methane safely. > I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain. Whoah, no, no no... you're thinking of something very different from methane, like perhaps heavy-metal contamination. Methane isn't toxic unless there's a ridiculous amount pumped into a room. [Corrected: Odorless] Most animals generate some methane when digesting things. TLDR: Nope, the issues with methane are going to be the climate and ozone-layer, not water-supplies.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Methane is actually odorless, but it is non toxic (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Safety ). The main risk is combustion.
      - unepipe 12y ago
        Additionally, a potentially bigger risk is if there is a massive methane release event, it could drastically accelerate global warming. Methane traps up to 100x more heat in the atmosphere than an equivalent amount of CO2 (over a 5 year period) and 72x more heat over a 20 year period Source: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-carbon-dioxide-a-greenhouse-gas-showdown/ http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-ca...
scarmig 12y ago
I worry a lot about global warming, but I've never found that argument massively persuasive. The core worry you're getting at is that there might exist turning points, where a marginal unit of carbon will cause greater feedbacks and runaway global warming, at least until we stumble on another stable equilibrium. If that were the case, though, we likely would have hit that turning point in the past. The Earth's temperature has been significantly warmer in recent memory, and if it were, we'd have already fallen past that turning point. This isn't to say that there aren't currently positive feedback mechanism, nor that they're not big positive feedbacks, nor even that we won't stumble upon new positive feedbacks as we hit temperatures outside our historical memory. However, it's unlikely we'll ever hit a point where a unit of carbon causes a discontinuous change in average global temperatures.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It's an odd juxtaposition to see your comment about how this won't happen because it never happened before, right next to a comment about how it has happened before.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    Not really. This article is pretty poor. TLDR: "Something melted, therefore global warming is the cause and mass extinction is the inevitable result" is such absurd logic its not worth wasting time debating it. Have you ever seen fossilized sea creatures buried in rocks thousands of feet above and thousands of miles away from the sea? The planet has undergone massive climate and geological upheavals, and mass extinction events. Human life is not really so important. Wether or not even we survive as a species is like a drop in the bucket of nothingness. Remenber there were fire-making, tool-making, upright walking species besides us that survived long enough to leave traces of their civilization. No body owed them anything, survival least of all, and as a result they perished.
  - scarmig 12y ago
    "Recent" is the key word, here. The PT event was 250 million years ago, and the Earth was a very different place then, including being significantly warmer. The Holocene climatic optimum, on the other hand, was something like ten thousand years ago, and it explored temperatures that we're not close to (yet). If there were a life-ending loaded clathrate gun out there, the Earth would have hit it and triggered it then, not when we're experiencing relatively cooler temperatures now or in the near future. Unless it somehow got loaded in the ten thousand years since then, but no one thinks that. ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that climate change is fake, or that it's harmless because temperatures have been higher in the past. Those are orthogonal arguments to this (and they're bad arguments). This is just a statement about whether we're going to accidentally shock the globe into a radically different climate by triggering a methane clathrate gun.
samiru 12y ago
Yeah, maybe. On the other hand the whole phenomenon seems to be very common and has been going on for thousands of years. Just in this one picture one can see hundreds of such craters: http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/crater-siberia.png http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/crater-... Trying to link the phenomenon to the post Industrial Age 'Global Warming' I call that just another lie.
- fla 12y ago
  I think you're wrong here. The 'craters' on the picture are defenately something different. If it was that common, the scientists and/or the people would know about it. What we're talking about here is very rare.
  - samiru 12y ago
    Ok. Here is a Google Maps link to the Yamal Peninsula, the area the "crater" was found. It is filled with these same kind of little ponds: https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Poluostrov+Yamal,+Jamalo-Nenetskin+autonominen+piirikunta,+Ven%C3%A4j%C3%A4,+629705/@69.047518,70.2850682,67735m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x449055f4f8dea577:0x8ae223c41688bebf https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Poluostrov+Yamal,+Jamalo-Ne... If you somehow would get a hole in the ground, it does not sound that far fetched to me it would get filled with water over time. And of course other people have noticed this too. It is just, that many times the most vocal ones are the people who have a belief system/agenda to drive. How things really are, is not a matter of an opinion.
    - gus_massa 12y ago
      Yes, the holes become lakes. From the article: > Russian scientists have now spotted a total of seven craters, five of which are in the Yamal Peninsula. Two of those holes have since turned into lakes.

projectileboy 12y ago

You mess with a nonlinear system, you get nonlinear results.

1971genocide 12y ago
haha, i have been saying people this thing to people for years. the climate is non-linear which means slight changes can result in bifurcations that are irreversible. When we lose all our mathematical models we lose our understanding and once that happens we are no different from cavemens who dont understand how fire works.

jobu 12y ago

What I'm curious about is the mechanisms that might counteract global warming. The earth has cycled in the past between hot and cold periods, so there are obviously natural mechanisms that cause it to reverse as well. Could we harness these mechanisms to keep the earth compatible with human habitation?

dflock 12y ago
I think that this mechanism is mostly CO2 being slowly weathered out of the atmosphere and disposed of, mostly via limestone formation. This takes a very long time and is very slow, so it can only catch up if you stop pumping it out.
- agapos 12y ago
  The colder oceans are notable natural CO2 absorbents, plus we have to mention the effects of life itself: photo-synthesizing plants and unicellular creatures. Like the historical ones that fixated enough carbon to create today's wast coal, oil and methane fields. As I recall, there is a group of creatures that may did the first big wave of carbon fixation at the beginning of life, binding CO2 and releasing the important O2 that enabled the appearance of complex life forms, but I can't remember it's name.
  - dflock 12y ago
    Algae, or Green/blue Algae, more specifically.
tim333 12y ago
The earth has sometimes been cooled by volcanoes putting stuff in the atmosphere and that could be simulated by pumping sulphur dioxide though whether its a good idea is dubious. Funnily enough the present man made warming may actually help keep the earth compatible with human habitation as there are arguments it may head in to another ice age otherwise.
madaxe_again 12y ago
Well, the main feedback mechanism that I can see being a major influence in the beginning chaos is that of albedo. In short, atmospheric warming causes more water vapour higher in the atmosphere, causing higher and denser clouds - which will reflect most light and energy and prevent it from reaching the surface. This in turn could cause snow and ice cover on the ground, due to lowered surface temperatures, which would feed further into a cooling system. You'd expect to see this effect most prominently in continental rain shadow areas, particularly at altitude. Frankly, the outcome is unknowable, there are too many variables, both known and unknown. The only element which does seem inevitable is that there will be major changes to human civilisation. Oh - one thought I did have was blanketing the Arctic in artificial icebergs - just big white floating plastic platforms, millions of them.

benihana 12y ago

This exact thing (with methane) has happened before and it is believed to be the cause of the extinction of extinctions, the PT event. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

jfoster 12y ago
If methane makes it into all of our water, can we defend against that? Can we filter it out? I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > If methane makes it into all of our water It won't, methane doesn't "want" to mix with water anyway, at normal pressures and temperatures any dissolved methane will start to bubble out and float away. > Can we filter it out? It leaves on its own. Most of the time when you're concerned about methane in the water, it's because the water is being pumped up from underground where they were trapped together. The main risk there is explosions or fires if your equipment doesn't bleed off the methane safely. > I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain. Whoah, no, no no... you're thinking of something very different from methane, like perhaps heavy-metal contamination. Methane isn't toxic unless there's a ridiculous amount pumped into a room. [Corrected: Odorless] Most animals generate some methane when digesting things. TLDR: Nope, the issues with methane are going to be the climate and ozone-layer, not water-supplies.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Methane is actually odorless, but it is non toxic (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Safety ). The main risk is combustion.
    - unepipe 12y ago
      Additionally, a potentially bigger risk is if there is a massive methane release event, it could drastically accelerate global warming. Methane traps up to 100x more heat in the atmosphere than an equivalent amount of CO2 (over a 5 year period) and 72x more heat over a 20 year period Source: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-carbon-dioxide-a-greenhouse-gas-showdown/ http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-ca...

scarmig 12y ago

I worry a lot about global warming, but I've never found that argument massively persuasive. The core worry you're getting at is that there might exist turning points, where a marginal unit of carbon will cause greater feedbacks and runaway global warming, at least until we stumble on another stable equilibrium. If that were the case, though, we likely would have hit that turning point in the past. The Earth's temperature has been significantly warmer in recent memory, and if it were, we'd have already fallen past that turning point. This isn't to say that there aren't currently positive feedback mechanism, nor that they're not big positive feedbacks, nor even that we won't stumble upon new positive feedbacks as we hit temperatures outside our historical memory. However, it's unlikely we'll ever hit a point where a unit of carbon causes a discontinuous change in average global temperatures.

mikeash 12y ago
It's an odd juxtaposition to see your comment about how this won't happen because it never happened before, right next to a comment about how it has happened before.
- 001sky 12y ago
  Not really. This article is pretty poor. TLDR: "Something melted, therefore global warming is the cause and mass extinction is the inevitable result" is such absurd logic its not worth wasting time debating it. Have you ever seen fossilized sea creatures buried in rocks thousands of feet above and thousands of miles away from the sea? The planet has undergone massive climate and geological upheavals, and mass extinction events. Human life is not really so important. Wether or not even we survive as a species is like a drop in the bucket of nothingness. Remenber there were fire-making, tool-making, upright walking species besides us that survived long enough to leave traces of their civilization. No body owed them anything, survival least of all, and as a result they perished.
- scarmig 12y ago
  "Recent" is the key word, here. The PT event was 250 million years ago, and the Earth was a very different place then, including being significantly warmer. The Holocene climatic optimum, on the other hand, was something like ten thousand years ago, and it explored temperatures that we're not close to (yet). If there were a life-ending loaded clathrate gun out there, the Earth would have hit it and triggered it then, not when we're experiencing relatively cooler temperatures now or in the near future. Unless it somehow got loaded in the ten thousand years since then, but no one thinks that. ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that climate change is fake, or that it's harmless because temperatures have been higher in the past. Those are orthogonal arguments to this (and they're bad arguments). This is just a statement about whether we're going to accidentally shock the globe into a radically different climate by triggering a methane clathrate gun.

samiru 12y ago

Yeah, maybe. On the other hand the whole phenomenon seems to be very common and has been going on for thousands of years. Just in this one picture one can see hundreds of such craters: http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/crater-siberia.png http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/crater-... Trying to link the phenomenon to the post Industrial Age 'Global Warming' I call that just another lie.

fla 12y ago
I think you're wrong here. The 'craters' on the picture are defenately something different. If it was that common, the scientists and/or the people would know about it. What we're talking about here is very rare.
- samiru 12y ago
  Ok. Here is a Google Maps link to the Yamal Peninsula, the area the "crater" was found. It is filled with these same kind of little ponds: https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Poluostrov+Yamal,+Jamalo-Nenetskin+autonominen+piirikunta,+Ven%C3%A4j%C3%A4,+629705/@69.047518,70.2850682,67735m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x449055f4f8dea577:0x8ae223c41688bebf https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Poluostrov+Yamal,+Jamalo-Ne... If you somehow would get a hole in the ground, it does not sound that far fetched to me it would get filled with water over time. And of course other people have noticed this too. It is just, that many times the most vocal ones are the people who have a belief system/agenda to drive. How things really are, is not a matter of an opinion.
  - gus_massa 12y ago
    Yes, the holes become lakes. From the article: > Russian scientists have now spotted a total of seven craters, five of which are in the Yamal Peninsula. Two of those holes have since turned into lakes.