Scientists Sound the Alarm: CO2 Levels

[satimy]

Clearly taxing carbon will save us ! The US should aim to become fully nuclear and solar within 20 years. A carbon tax is just a scam

[Dr Assbandit]

the chinnes , muslims and indians that will take over the earth wont be able to run a factory. The world will be safe

You're right, we're too busy playing doctor for you lot .

[alexw]

The planet is in a long term warming trend, and none of these scientists can tell us how much human activity has contributed to it. The most disastrous decisions of the last few decades was to push globalism and the industrialization of China and India. Calls to cut back on emissions are going to have the effect of killing millions of people in the third world, where industrialization has afforded a massive improvement in the standard of living.

Of course, if people really desperately believe that global warming is likely to cause the end of the world by making it uninhabitable for everybody, then perhaps the only way to avoid this is for countries like the United States to eradicate about 90% of the human population on this planet. Then again, people aren't proposing this because they aren't really serious about CO2 levels, because it is really just a political issue at this point.

Yeah that's total bullcrap. Natural climatic variations should at present result in a slow and slight cooling of the atmosphere hence the planet should be in a cooling trend. Yet despite that we see substantial warming. Thus the answer to the question of how much of the observed warming is due to man is - all of it.

The sun is more complex, but researchers have found that the recent solar-cycle minimum (between 1986 and 2008) was actually lower than the previous two solar-cycle minimums (the sun moves between quiet minimums and active maximums about once every five years). If anything, the IPPC concluded, recent solar activity should have resulted in cooling, not warming. Likewise, a 2012 study found that between 2005 and 2010, a period when solar activity was low, the Earth still absorbed 0.58 watts of excess energy per square meter, continuing to warm despite the lower level of solar energy going into the system.

[Allybeboba]

One has to wonder what caused the drastic drop in those few years.

[alexw]

Speaking of cooling, at what point does the natural trend towards another ice age overcome global warming? 500 years? 1000? More?

I ask because of course we've been in a relatively warm period now for about 12,000 years, and should be cooling off again. Is there a point at which the process of an incoming ice age renders climate change moot, or has industrialization permanently shifted this cycle?

It doesn't. The CO2 we have released has pushed us out of that natural cycle for the foreseeable future. If we ever enter back into it, it will at a minimum be hundreds if not thousands of years in the future.

[Saucexorzski]

Well shucks if only folks in the US had acted then this never would have been a problem.

[JohnBrown1917]

Yet people here still vote for politicians that deny climate change. Like Wilders.

[Logwyn]

How do we know things like " the highest it has been in more than 10,000 years."

[Pterodactylus]

How do we know things like " the highest it has been in more than 10,000 years."

We can measure the past atmospheric composition directly because of gases that are trapped in ice cores.

[Kalador]

How do we know things like " the highest it has been in more than 10,000 years."

We have very good knowledge of Co2 level via ice core, i think the longest record is about 800000 years.

[Endus]

Speaking of cooling, at what point does the natural trend towards another ice age overcome global warming? 500 years? 1000? More?

I ask because of course we've been in a relatively warm period now for about 12,000 years, and should be cooling off again. Is there a point at which the process of an incoming ice age renders climate change moot, or has industrialization permanently shifted this cycle?

The natural cycles we're seeing WOULD be pushing towards cooling.

Technical point; we're in an "ice age". That's a term for any geological period where there are ice caps at the poles. What popular culture calls an "ice age" is more accurately a "glacial period", and we're currently in an "interglacial period", all within that single ice age.

Those glacial-interglacial cycles are pretty consistent, and have to do with orbital dynamics and such, but they're also REALLY small shifts. The coldest part of the last glacial period, for instance, was with a globe about 4 degrees Celsius cooler than the modern era. It doesn't take a lot. By comparison, this century, we've already warmed by 0.8 degrees C.

Now, for perspective, glacial periods are marked by a slow cooling, over (very roughly) 50,000 years or so. The interglacials are sparked off by geologically rapid warming, over just a few thousand years, then after that spike, it slowly cools off again. So "rapid" spike up, slow cooling after.

But that "rapid" warming still takes thousands of years. Hence the quotes. It's "rapid" compared to the glacial cooling speed, but not "rapid" compared to human survival. The current warming trend is dozens of times more rapid than the fastest interglacial warming we can identify. It's much faster, and it's starting near the peak of an interglacial's warmest point.

The greatest concern is that this could push us out of this glacial/interglacial cycle. Out of the Quaternary Ice Age that we've been in for the last 2.5 million years. We just don't know what would happen, if that occurred. We have some guesses, and some things (like sea level rise) are pretty easily quantifiable, but it's still a massive shift to a climatic balance that we've literally never seen. To put this in some perspective, before the Quaternary Ice Age, we're not talking about cave men. We're talking about Homo Habilis. Which was a small step up from, say, a chimpanzee; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis, not yet into "cave man" territory, even. The majority of modern species have adapted to the conditions of an ice age, we don't know what the new balance point would be like, or what could adapt. Because we just don't have any data, because we've never seen anything like this happen.

But, that's still talking geological time scales. If warming continues, it's still going to take centuries for the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves to melt completely; they're MASSIVE hunks of ice, and the temperatures in those regions won't be tropical, even if they'll be significantly warmer than they have been (warming tends to occur more rapidly nearest the poles). Not something that's going to happen in our lifetimes.

[falagar112]

The planet is in a long term warming trend, and none of these scientists can tell us how much human activity has contributed to it. The most disastrous decisions of the last few decades was to push globalism and the industrialization of China and India. Calls to cut back on emissions are going to have the effect of killing millions of people in the third world, where industrialization has afforded a massive improvement in the standard of living.

Of course, if people really desperately believe that global warming is likely to cause the end of the world by making it uninhabitable for everybody, then perhaps the only way to avoid this is for countries like the United States to eradicate about 90% of the human population on this planet. Then again, people aren't proposing this because they aren't really serious about CO2 levels, because it is really just a political issue at this point.

Except that is not really true. While yes the sun does play a role in the Earths own warm/cold cycle, we are at an all time low since measurements began.

"The current solar cycle began on January 4, 2008, with minimal activity until early 2010.[13][14] It is on track to have the lowest recorded sunspot activity since accurate records began in 1750. The cycle featured a "double-peaked" solar maximum. The first peak reached 99 in 2011 and the second in early 2014 at 101.[15]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#Cycle_24

That aside - you can have a look at the surface of Venus to have an idea what a runaway greenhouse effect does to a planet.

That is not to say that this carbon tax is a scam or not, it is nothing near what we need to actually do. But to say that we should just kill off 90% of the population to make it sustainable is not a solution either. Because there is no need to. With current technology we can already achieve a big change - but people don't care and/or the existence of borders make it hard to execute. A solar power grid utilizing the 1% of the Sahara desert is enough to power the whole world, literally. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2.../#182175ecd440

So to take energy out of the equation, what is left?
An unstable region, and to much money invested in traditional energy sources.
We don't need to start killing people to make it sustainable, we need to get rid of these coorporations that fuck it up for all of humanity out of the greed for money and status.

Investing in solar/wind/nuclear and so on might not yield returns for a long time, but it's something we have to do eventually so the only reason to not start now is because people don't want to pay the price. So you get this attitude towards the problem:

it will take many years until it affects us , so we shouldnt bother . next genaration should take care of thereselfs

And just to emphasize I am pro globalization but I am against the way they currently see said globalization in reality. Just to make that clear.
@Endus
Yes we are prepared in the sense that after the 1950 thing we started to battle the sea properly. But we are not as prepared as it might look from the outside. If one particular dike near the "randstad" breaks, 7 million (so 40% of our total population!) are at risk of flood - and there is no feasible evacuation plan in existence. They've tried to come up with one multiple times but they consider it "impossible" to execute.

So in short, we're just as fucked as all of you

[NYC17]

It's cool, Scott Pruitt doesn't think is a problem. We're fine. Everything is fine.

[Endus]

@Endus
Yes we are prepared in the sense that after the 1950 thing we started to battle the sea properly. But we are not as prepared as it might look from the outside. If one particular dike near the "randstad" breaks, 7 million (so 40% of our total population!) are at risk of flood - and there is no feasible evacuation plan in existence. They've tried to come up with one multiple times but they consider it "impossible" to execute.

So in short, we're just as fucked as all of you

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to say "the Dutch are fine and impossible to flood for magical reasons", more just that the dyke system has been built up with the EXPECTATION of flooding, from the beginning, so flood management tools exist to try and mitigate that.

Cities are always going to be at greater risk, it's more that a lot of what's dyked is farmland now, and that's easier to manage flooding on. Though given sea level rise, it may not be long-term sustainable; it may just reach a point where it's not worth the investment to protect.

I'm just comparing the Netherlands preparation and planning to, say, New Orleans, where there was basically none, not just "we can't make this feasibly work".

[Symphonic]

Let's blow some nukes in the atmosphere to create a hole for the CO2 to escape.

[Shakadam]

The natural cycles we're seeing WOULD be pushing towards cooling.

Technical point; we're in an "ice age". That's a term for any geological period where there are ice caps at the poles. What popular culture calls an "ice age" is more accurately a "glacial period", and we're currently in an "interglacial period", all within that single ice age.

Those glacial-interglacial cycles are pretty consistent, and have to do with orbital dynamics and such, but they're also REALLY small shifts. The coldest part of the last glacial period, for instance, was with a globe about 4 degrees Celsius cooler than the modern era. It doesn't take a lot. By comparison, this century, we've already warmed by 0.8 degrees C.

Now, for perspective, glacial periods are marked by a slow cooling, over (very roughly) 50,000 years or so. The interglacials are sparked off by geologically rapid warming, over just a few thousand years, then after that spike, it slowly cools off again. So "rapid" spike up, slow cooling after.

But that "rapid" warming still takes thousands of years. Hence the quotes. It's "rapid" compared to the glacial cooling speed, but not "rapid" compared to human survival. The current warming trend is dozens of times more rapid than the fastest interglacial warming we can identify. It's much faster, and it's starting near the peak of an interglacial's warmest point.

The greatest concern is that this could push us out of this glacial/interglacial cycle. Out of the Quaternary Ice Age that we've been in for the last 2.5 million years. We just don't know what would happen, if that occurred. We have some guesses, and some things (like sea level rise) are pretty easily quantifiable, but it's still a massive shift to a climatic balance that we've literally never seen. To put this in some perspective, before the Quaternary Ice Age, we're not talking about cave men. We're talking about Homo Habilis. Which was a small step up from, say, a chimpanzee; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis, not yet into "cave man" territory, even. The majority of modern species have adapted to the conditions of an ice age, we don't know what the new balance point would be like, or what could adapt. Because we just don't have any data, because we've never seen anything like this happen.

But, that's still talking geological time scales. If warming continues, it's still going to take centuries for the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves to melt completely; they're MASSIVE hunks of ice, and the temperatures in those regions won't be tropical, even if they'll be significantly warmer than they have been (warming tends to occur more rapidly nearest the poles). Not something that's going to happen in our lifetimes.

Exactly. Even with current levels of warming it's still gonna be hundreds of years before any really noticable change to worldwide climate occurs, at which point the earth won't be the only planet we're living on anymore. Climate change isn't a threat to humanity because even if it's "rapid", it still takes long enough for us to react to it and adapt. Some animals that can't adapt that rapidly will surely go extinct in the wild and others will take over, but in any case climate change has a minimal impact in those cases compared to our direct actions such as fishing, hunting, logging etc.

EDIT just to be clear: I'm not saying climate change isn't real or that we shouldn't try to reduce emissions. Clean air and clean nature is good for everyone. I'm just saying it's not the end of the fucking world as so many would have us believe.

[schwarzkopf]

We're not doomed. We just need to recognize that we've already fucked the global climate balance up, and get ready to adapt to the consequences, proactively rather than reactively.

In other words - we are doomed....

[Allybeboba]

The EPA declared human breath(CO2) a pollutant. We produce ~8% of the man-made CO2 emissions simply by breathing.
Depending on your beliefs humans have lived on the Earth in a homeostasis environment for millions or thousands of years until recently.
Here is a nice little discussion on the matter. https://www.skepticalscience.com/hum...-emissions.htm

[falagar112]

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to say "the Dutch are fine and impossible to flood for magical reasons", more just that the dyke system has been built up with the EXPECTATION of flooding, from the beginning, so flood management tools exist to try and mitigate that.

Cities are always going to be at greater risk, it's more that a lot of what's dyked is farmland now, and that's easier to manage flooding on. Though given sea level rise, it may not be long-term sustainable; it may just reach a point where it's not worth the investment to protect.

I'm just comparing the Netherlands preparation and planning to, say, New Orleans, where there was basically none, not just "we can't make this feasibly work".

Yeah exactly. Fairly sure the Dutch are building the new protections at New Orleans, we are considered to be the best when it comes to combating the sea. So all I was really trying to say is that, if we - considered to be the best - have our dyke protection system based on a max spring flood of about 2 meters, you can imagine what a 3m worldwide rise will do to the Netherlands.

Hint:


As you can see our dykes around the randstad will actually still be above sea level, in the middle of the new sea. I guess a nice testament to "we tried"

[Zabatakis]

It's cool, Scott Pruitt doesn't think is a problem. We're fine. Everything is fine.

Katrina and other such events were fake news.