Worth noting: a massive volcanic eruption of sulfur in Siberia ended almost all life on Earth once. It rained sulfuric acid with the pH of lemon juice worldwide and everything died, it took 10 million years for diversity to start building again.
Honest question, how far could we live if all human resources were dedicated to create structure, devices and tech for high pH (and low biomass I guess) environment ?
Like Noah, I'd expect there to be much fun made of such an effort and criticism of the resource expenditure. A hypothetical ark builder would probably be better off focusing on a min viable population and pretending the effort had to do with space colony prep or something.
You mean low pH? High pH would be almost impossible to adapt for.
But, we will probably start living (and growing crops) indoor before we fully adapt (require knowing about plastics). We can probably adapt crops in a couple of decades if current science survives.
1) What are practical solutions to runaway climate change, if any? 2) How can I prepare myself to survive through the worst-case scenario? 3) Where's the best place to move preemptively? I imagine that the means of food production will be in the hands of a few countries.
Mars is currently sterile, i.e. it's already in much worse shape that earth would be even in a worst-case scenario. If we can't figure out a way to survive here on earth even in a worst-case scenario, there's no way we're going to be able to survive on Mars.
You don't have to do anything to prepare. You don't have to move preemptively or worry about food production. Climate change is not a 80 year apocalyptic concern, you will be long gone before the dire consequences are reached.
>Climate change is not a 80 year apocalyptic concern, you will be long gone before the dire consequences are reached.
Nothing changes until everything changes all at once.
Civilization has a huge, but not unlimited, ability to withstand huge shocks.
Climate change does many things. More intense and frequent storms. More droughts. More floods. More firestorms/forest fires. More hurricanes and tornadoes.
All of these things stress systems.
Which systems can withstand an ever increasing ramp up towards more stress and shock?
Which systems can't? Will the ones that can't take down the others through a chain reaction of refugees and mass humanitarian crises?
It's way more complicated than "don't worry for 80 years".
I think it's going to be a much slower burn this time around. More like boiling a crab very, very slowly. We had a good run but in the end the dinosaurs had the last laugh.
> The lakes are a type of thermokarst lake, which form when thawing permafrost causes the surface to collapse and fill in with meltwater. These ones are bright blue and bubbling, because of methane that's leaking into them before escaping into the atmosphere.
> Researchers announced that they're also monitoring around 7,000 gas bubbles or 'pingos', which have formed in Siberia and are at risk of exploding to form huge craters.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13941923
> Methane is roughly 30 times more potent than CO2 as a heat-trapping gas.
> By 2100, up to 205 billion T of carbon emissions will be released by permafrost if climate change continues to intensify.
> Previous research had suggested that a global temperature rise of 1.5°C (2.7°F) would be enough to start the melting of Siberia's permafrost, and scientists are concerned that these lakes and pingos are a sign it's already happening.
> What's interesting is that the satellite data suggests the leaks are happening year-round in these regions, even at temperatures close to 0°C (32°F).
They aren't entirely sure what's causing them, but the hypothesis for now is that it could be related to seismic activity.
"For example, over one of the gas deposits (in Yamal), lakes are located along two lines ... looking like a giant cross," Bogoyavlensky told the Siberian Times.
This suggests "genetic connection of craters with deep faults in the Earth's crust, but to confirm we need to conduct thorough seismic research".
The future in increasingly clear, and utterly terrifying.
I hope you're right, but suspect the "but maybe not!" discussions about the local details in different areas are less important than finding solutions to the big picture that we do understand.
It's impossible to imagine a level of environmental degradation that would cause extraction companies to say "On second thought, let's leave that resource where it is."
"The machines, each the size of a small house, are equipped with rock-crushing teeth resembling the large incisors of a dinosaur. The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way. The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons.
'A lot of people don't realize that there are more mineral resources on the seafloor than on land," said Michael Johnston, CEO of Nautilus, by phone from the company's field office in Brisbane, Australia. "Technology has allowed us to go there.'
...
Over two-dozen contracts have already been granted to explore hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean floor by a United Nations body called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates areas of the seafloor that lie outside of any national jurisdiction."
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf alone has an estimated amount of 50 to 800 gigatons of CH4. Current atmospheric concentration of CH4 is about 5.
I think our best interest is to stop or slow down the process and try to find out a solution. And that is achieved by keeping the permafrost frozen.
One solution could be using metanotrophs, which are unicellular organisms that eat methane. The advantage over reacting chemicals is that they reproduce on their own. Maybe we enhance them through GMO to make them have a higher fertility rate.
I dunno, methane isn't very energy dense. It's hard for me to imagine the fire spreading unless the methane was already in very dangerous concentrations. But I don't know! Seems worth investigating.
Also, what would be the risk of something like that perturbing larger bubbles and causing an eruption, like a popping balloon?
If this somehow magically inspired people around the world to literally abandon modern life, you'd still be seeing the current trends coast for at least a couple of decades. Needless to say, far from anything like radical change, we're continuing full steam ahead.
How do you supposed you are going to survive without all the affordances of some kind of civilization. Do you imagine some kind of postman or waterworld type of thing?
I'm pretty sure either we all make it or none of us do. There is no escaping the inevitability of mammalian biology. You need to keep your body at a certain temperature and it's looking more and more like that is going to be impossible in the new climate regime.
Why the armageddon claims ? You realize humans have previously coped just fine with water levels meters higher than they are now I hope.
So given that the worst IPCC predictions only predict about a 2m water level rise, and that so far the first 20 years of those predictions turned out to have been WAY overblown, I think we'll do just fine as a species, even long term.
In fact, even if worst comes to worst, medieval water management techniques will in fact be able to prevent any coastline encroachment until well into the 2200s. At that point, I think we may put some thought into adapting, and I bet we'll be able to come up with something (or we could just move a few cities. That too has been done before. Okay, okay, more than "a few". And no, we won't run out of arable land, or water, or ... I mean it's unknown of course, but it's not out of the question that the planet actually becomes more hospitable to humans with higher temperatures. Certainly in a few regions that will be true, and maybe globally).
TLDR: you will be perfectly fine, even under the worst of the worst predictions, and so will California beachfront property, or Manhattan, or ... at the very least for 4-5 generations.
Rising sea levels are a concern in the long-term, but what I'm most worried about in my lifetime is the collapse of the industrial food system due to rapid warming.
Basically if the Earth warms faster than plants and science can adapt, it's a real possibility that a very large chunk of the arable land that currently feeds eight billion people worldwide will become useless. The fear is that we won't be able to grow wheat or rice where we used to, due to heat and drought (Great Plains) or floods (Southeast Asia) or whatever else.
Sure, we could just start farming Siberia and Northern Canada, but it would take decades to establish all the infrastructure necessary to do that, and in the meantime we'd have to deal with truly massive famines, political destabilization, and the collapse of many states. Not to mention the fact that crop yields will inevitably be lower in arctic latitudes due to shorter growing seasons.
Our entire civilization is built on a global, industrial food network, and it's more precarious than you think. Most countries don't have reserves of food at all, and the ones that do only have scant reserves. If methane releases cause the Earth's climate to lurch warmer in a short enough period of time, a couple real good crop failures will cause the network to collapse, and our civilization (or at least a few entire regions) will collapse in short order.
This figure [0], which you can read more about in this summary [1] compares the predictions from the IPCC third assessment report with satellite observations. It shows that the observations track the upper end of the predicted range from the third assessment. If you want more detail you can find the original report here [2].
It is difficult to resolve that observation evidence with your claim that "the first 20 years of those predictions turned out to have been WAY overblown" - if anything, the predictions were too conservative.
You know it's posts like this that give climate science a VERY bad reputation. I've got a degree in statistics, so I read your post and immediately 3 alarm bells go off.
It is WIDELY known in scientific circles that IPCC predictions have a bit of a nasty habit of having, firstly, very dubious statistical underpinnings (which is another way of saying their methodology is complete shite). Secondly, without making any political claims, they systematically overstate the problem by a LOT. This is purely a statement based on the numbers they put out, and I imply no ulterior motive on their part. But their predictions do all seem to error on one side, never the other.
And yet here you are, making the exact opposite claim to what I know to be true. But there are a few alarm bells. You disagree with how I thought I know the world to be, and you make an oddly specific cherry-picked argument. Here's what I mean:
1) broad claim that would barely gain support from the rest of your argument. Illustrating correctness from cherry-picked data points is an argument that does not belong in science.
2) very weird pick of the predicted and evaluated variable (obviously the main predicted climate variable is "temperature anomaly", so why don't you go for that one ? Is this a case of "we got the basics of our prediction wildly wrong, but in this long list of things we touched on sideways we lucked out ! We were right after all !" ?)
3) You pick the "third assessment report". How did the first 2 predictions fare ? (this is useful in more ways, because those can of course be evaluated against more data than this one)
4) You picked the third assessment report. Was this even a prediction ? The comparison stops in 2002 on your linked graph. When was AR3 released ?
Let's take the easiest one of these questions and check it out. The fourth one:
Okay so the prediction of the IPCC from 1970 to 2002/2006 (different datasets) has a publication date of 2001. Whereas from all the IPCC predictions there are plenty available to do better checks of their accuracy. Very, very suspicious. So really, there's only a single datapoint in there (for both series) that is actually a prediction (ie. not known at the time of publication, and only 1/7th of any of the data is predicted. Furthermore, the graph neglects to point out where this prediction actually started, which probably led you to make the wrong conclusion)
Now let's look at alarm signals 2 and 3 and let's actually evaluate IPCC accuracy. Blogposts made by others you probably found by Googling your wanted conclusion are apparently allowed in support of one's argument, so:
"Based upon these and other lines of evidence (laid out in our numerous scientific publications, books, blogs articles, social media (see publications listed here and here for example)), we conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded."
So in conclusion, your main claim, that the IPCC reports contain accurate predictions, aside from being overly broad, is weakened by your listed sources. It is also widely known to be wrong, and indeed on closer observation it is wrong.
(I have in fact ran the numbers myself, and concluded that IPCC methodology is crap, and it has in fact had predictable results : disastrously wrong predictions. The IPCC would have to be correct for tens of thousands of years from this point forward to make their "95%" predictions actually correct in 95% of cases)
Another non-political interesting factoid: the IPCC has stopped giving values for the climate forcing variable in their latest report. I would just like to point out that this is not the correct way to inspire confidence in one's predictions.
And there are people, even in my own university that won't just make claims like yours, outrageous and wrong, but actually use the administration to suppress people correcting them. A decent portion of the statistics/math and some in the physics department have suddenly found themselves defending basic math. Whilst none of this of course reflects directly on the science behind it I would just like to make a final point that climate science was recently (few years ago actually, I'm getting old) relocated in my university. It used to be part of the science department. It is now part of the humanities. You know, where theology and philosophy goes.
>> You know it's posts like this that give climate science a VERY bad reputation. I've got a degree in statistics, so I read your post and immediately 3 alarm bells go off.
You've got a degree in statistics, and I have a PhD "in" Oceanography, does it make a difference? Not really.
>> It is WIDELY known in scientific circles that IPCC predictions have a bit of a nasty habit of having, firstly, very dubious statistical underpinnings (which is another way of saying their methodology is complete shite). Secondly, without making any political claims, they systematically overstate the problem by a LOT.
The IPCC produce assessments of published research, but do not, as a body, perform research, or make predictions. Their methodology is to assess existing research, and to attempt to construct a representative summary. This is pretty much the only way one can conduct a literature review, so it is difficult to see why you would describe it as "complete shite".
>> And yet here you are, making the exact opposite claim. But there are a few alarm bells. You strongly disagree with how I thought I know the world to be, and you make an oddly specific cherry-picked argument. Here's what I mean:
I haven't made any claims, or disagreed with anything, I simply referred you to published literature on the subject which you mentioned.
>> 1) broad claim that would barely gain support from the rest of your argument
I don't understand what this means - I was only trying to provide you with some of the observational evidence relating to your claim.
>> 2) weird pick of the predicted variable (obviously the main predicted climate variable is "temperature anomaly") so why don't you go for that one ? (Ie. is this a case of "we got the basics of our prediction wildly wrong, but in this long list of things we touched on sideways we lucked out majorly and see ! We were right after all !" ?)
I "picked" the variable you were talking about: sea level rise ("So given that the worst IPCC predictions only predict about a 2m water level rise, and that so far the first 20 years of those predictions turned out to have been WAY overblown, I think we'll do just fine as a species, even long term." for reference).
>> 3) You pick the "third assessment report" (which is actually the fourth, because counted from 0). Pray tell, how did predictions 0, 1, and 2 go ?
Your claim (which I read as being that the first 20 years of sea level rise predictions were "WAY overblown") is incorrect (putting philosophical points about the nature of truth to one side). I know it is incorrect, because I have read so many papers, and been to so many talks, that describe evidence to the contrary. I typed "sea level rise predictions" into google, because I know that skepticalscience have good articles that explain the various issues, and I found the one that I wanted. I can go and find more, if you really need it.
>> 4) You picked the third assessment report. Hmmmm. Was this even a prediction ? The comparison stops in 2002 on your linked graph. When was AR3 released ?
See above. But: it is the tide gauge data (in red) that stops in 2002, not the predictions. The comparison I referred to was with the satellite data (in blue), which continues to 2009. If you can't be bothered to find out what happened to the tide gauge data then let me know, and I'll look into it for you, for both our sakes. I can, however, be fairly confident in suggesting that it's probably not a grand conspiracy.
>> Let's take the easiest one of these questions and check it out. The fourth one:
>> Okay so the prediction of the IPCC from 1970 to 2002/2006 (different datasets) has a publication date of 2001. Whereas from all the IPCC predictions there are plenty available to do better checks of their accuracy. Very, very suspicious. So really, there's only a single datapoint in there (for both series) that is actually a prediction (ie. not known at the time of publication, and only 1/7th of any of the data is predicted. Furthermore, the graph neglects to point out where this prediction actually started, which probably led you to make the wrong conclusion)
I can't understand what you're trying to say here. What does "different datasets" refer to? What is the "single datapoint"? The prediction on the graph I linked to is the gray band - it is fairly clearly marked, and I would recommend reading the article to understand the context. You seem to have misunderstood what was prediction and what was observation. I haven't made any conclusions, only referred you (both indirectly and directly) to the conclusions of experts in that sub-field.
>> Now let's look at alarm signals 2 and 3 and let's actually evaluate IPCC accuracy. Blogposts made by others you probably found by Googling your wanted conclusion are apparently allowed in support of one's argument, so:
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli....
>> Oops ...
You do understand, right, that the graph I showed you demonstrates that the models are underestimating sea level rise? In other words, it is showing that the models used to compile that figure, which were state of the art at the time, were relatively poor (though not terrible) predictors of sea level rise - something we can probably agree on!
>> "Based upon these and other lines of evidence (laid out in our numerous scientific publications, books, blogs articles, social media (see publications listed here and here for example)), we conclude that future global warming will occur at a pace substantially lower than that upon which US federal and international actions to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are founded."
You can claim that the page I linked to and the page you linked to are comparable if you wish. One reports the synthesis of the efforts of thousands of scientists around the world who are ostensibly apolitical, the other the work of a group of people who have an explicit political agenda. You can draw your own conclusions about their respective credibility.
>> So in conclusion, your main claim, that the IPCC reports contain accurate predictions, aside from being overly broad, is weakened by your listed sources. It is also widely known to be wrong, and indeed on closer observation it is wrong.
You seem to have misunderstood the figure - I described how above. The only sources I listed were those for the figure.
>> (I have in fact ran the numbers myself, IPCC methodology is crap, and it has in fact had predictable results : disastrously wrong predictions. The IPCC would have to be correct for tens of thousands of years from this point forward to make their "95%" predictions actually correct in 95% of cases)
What numbers have you run yourself? Your second sentence must be misphrased, or I am simply incapable of understanding it - it appears to fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of a predictive distribution.
>> Another "non-political" interesting factoid: the IPCC has stopped giving values for the climate forcing variable in their latest report. I would just like to point out that this is not the correct way to inspire confidence in one's predictions.
You should review Chapter 8 of "The Physical Science Basis", titled "Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing". Find it here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
>> And of course, there are people, even in my own university that won't just make claims like yours, outrageous and wrong, but actually use the administration to suppress people correcting them. A decent portion of the statistics/math and some in the physics department have suddenly found themselves defending basic math. Whilst none of this of course reflects directly on the science behind it I would just like to make a final point that climate science was recently (few years ago actually, I'm getting old) relocated in my university. It used to be part of the science department. It is now part of the humanities. You know, where theology and philosophy goes.
So you make a dubious and suspect, wrong, claim, and you refuse to retract it. So now we know. So I guess this is not a mistake, you have a conclusion and you're ok with misdirecting people to show you're "really right".
Got it.
I'd ask you to just stop talking about science, but I guess that'd be too much to ask ?
>> So you make a dubious and suspect, wrong, claim, and you refuse to retract it. So now we know. So I guess this is not a mistake, you have a conclusion and you're ok with misdirecting people to show you're right.
Got it.
I have to say, your devastating critique really has shown me a thing or two! I'm envious of how capably you marshalled the evidence in support of your arguments, and of the way in which you picked apart my every point. It must give you a sense of pride, knowing what you do with such clarity.
>> I'd ask you to just stop talking about science, but I guess that'd be too much to ask ?
I can only say that in future I'll try to follow your example, and limit my discussions to subjects about which I have the same level of confidence as you displayed today.
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say ... there is a simple reason I refuse to engage. Here's how, at an extremely high level, IPCC predictions work :
A = state of the world (co2 levels, climate, current avg temp, ...) "input" so to speak
B = temperature anomaly ("output" of the model)
C = sea level rise, and other consequences
IPCC models work like this A -> B -> C.
They got B wrong. Therefore arguing about how C is really matching quite well is both wrong and, frankly, somewhere between very misguided and dishonest.
This is also a fraudulent way people sometimes defend their models, especially in economics. Sure they got the thing they predicted itself wrong, but out of the 100 things they made claims about using their faulty model, they got one or two right ! See ! They were right all along ...
Particularly bad examples are the many economic models that predicted productivity recovery since, oh, since 2000 at least. They got everything wrong, but they got, oh, say they got the gold price rise right they predicted due to their prediction of rapid inflation. Unfortunately there was a gold price rise, yes, no rapid inflation was observed though. If you believe models like that you will die a poor man.
Unfortunately, no, they weren't. It is perfectly normal for a few out of large amounts of claims to hit bullseye, even if they're based on entirely wrong data. Obviously their results, even the ones that -so far- hit bullseye, have zero predictive power.
If you understood the models well enough to critique them you would be a scientist in that field, and presumably your criticism would be in the form of an academic paper. However, you are merely a pseudointellectual science denier with an exaggerated sense of your own expertise.
You are assuming a gently 2m rise over the next 180 years, because the earth has been in a locally stable place with respect to climate.
Humanity has "jumped the edge", and the equilibrium will not necessarily settle back to the a similar pattern. Specifically, run-away positive feedback loops are lurking out there, which will push us to a completely foreign part of the parameter space for climate. In fact: it's not even climate - we are talking about the pH of the oceans and the composition of the atmosphere.
If this happens, your life will change catastrophically, very quickly.
Methanes and clathrates are just two well-known positive feedback systems in play; if we touch one of them we will be miserable. It probably won't end our species, but it will absolutely result in mass extinction of thousands of others.
The rising of the sea level is the least of the worry by a long shot. A much larger, more near-term destructive problem is ocean acidification. The loss of primary productivity across the board has the very real potential to be catastrophic within our lifetimes, and I say that with zero hyperbole.
I don't think water levels are the issue but runaway temperature changes. The thing with complex dynamical systems is that they have phase changes. Most models seem to predict phase changes right around a few degrees of change.
I imagine people are less concerned with the human genome surviving potentially harsh climates and are more concerned with living the rest of their and their children's lives in a post-apocalyptic, lawless society.
> I'm pretty sure either we all make it or none of us do. [...] You need to keep your body at a certain temperature and it's looking more and more like that is going to be impossible in the new climate regime.
The problem is that, as a gas, and as a gas that's emerging in an uncontrolled fashion across a large area which is poorly developed, far from infrastructure, and in many cases hostile to development.
Most natural gas is harvested from the same types of formations as those which form oil-bearing rock: a reservoir covered by some trapping (nonpermiable) formation, which releases gas only when tapped by a drill pipe. That is, the point of emission is very much a point.
The areas are also already being developed for oil, have access roads, labour, and infrastructure. As such, it's generally easier to capture and store the natural gas.
And even then, for much of early oil extraction, natural gas was flared off, because it was too difficult to capture, store, and transport it. Excess oil could be (and was) stored in impromptu open lakes formed by bulldozed earth. Gas requires airtight containers, and is far easier to manage when pressurised (300 atmospheres) or liquified (-162C).
Doing all of this in the Siberian tundra is a major challenge.
Flaring off the excess would be far more viable, and even that is a challenge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...