Climate Change

One of the small consolations of the Great Recessions was that global greenhouse-gas emissions had dipped slightly, giving the world a few years’ breathing room to figure out how to tackle global warming. But the Copenhagen climate talks fizzled, the world didn’t take advantage of the lull, and the grace period’s now over. According to new data from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, global carbon-dioxide emissions just saw their biggest one-year rise, a 6 percent jump in 2010.

The striking thing is that emissions are now rising faster than the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the IPCC in its 2007 report. What would this mean for global warming? The chart on the right, from a 2009 study by MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change, lays out the possibilities. If emissions keep growing at their current pace, then the average prediction from MIT’s modeling is that the world could heat up 5.2°C by 2100. But that’s just the average. There’s a 9 percent chance that global surface temperatures could rise more than 7°C — truly uncharted territory. And as we keep adding carbon-dioxide into the air, the odds that we’ll be able to dodge a drastic rise in temperatures become very, very low.

What would that big of a temperature leap do to the planet? Earlier this year, Climate Progress’s Joe Romm put together an excellent post going through the scientific literature on likely impacts from the IPCC’s worst-case emissions scenario. We’d be facing much higher land temperatures — as much as a 5.5°C (10°F) rise in parts of the United States — plus a six-foot sea-level rise by 2100, along with large species loss, many more extreme weather events, and a big hit to the world’s food supply. Arctic temperatures could rise as much as 11°C (20°F), which would, among other things, speed up the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet.

In any case, you can pick through the Energy Department’s emissions data here. About 41 percent of the carbon increase last year came from China, with 12 percent of the leap coming from the slowly recovering U.S. economy (overall U.S. emissions, however, are still lower than they were before the financial crisis).

Interestingly, as the AP’s Seth Borenstein points out, there does seem to be one small bright spot. The developed countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (not including the United States) have managed to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions and are on pace to meet their goals of an 8 percent cut below 1990 levels. But I’d advise caution here: There’s growing evidence that many European nations have been “outsourcing” their emissions to countries like China, and when those embedded emissions from imports get factored in, Europe doesn’t look quite as virtuous. But that’s another reminder that any attempt to tackle global warming has to be, well, global.

Well, this ruined my evening. :/

(Mods: If this sort of topic has been posted before and it didn't go well, feel free to nuke the thread. I haven't seen many climate change threads and I don't know if that's because of lack of interest or of failed previous threads, ala the various abortion threads.)

Everybody except for ecologists are surprised by these numbers. It's called feedback loops, and climate warming is one such system. As it gets hotter, the Northern hemisphere tundra - the world's largest biological stockpile of carbon - warms up. And as it warms up, the permafrost layers go deeper and deeper - and as the permafrost recedes, bacteria can live long enough between winters to start decomposing plant matter that hasn't decomposed in hundreds of thousands of years. So we have hundreds of thousands of years of stored carbon now getting dumped into the atmosphere in massive quantities, along with the fossil fuels that got this whole horrible feedback loop started in the first place. I am calling it right now, we will see a 10 degree increase in global temperatures by 2050, along with a rise in sea level of ten meters. It will be a world-altering catastrophe - the refugee crisis alone will push civilization to the brink, and the breakdown in supply lines will disrupt everything we have built over the last hundred years. A computer like the one you are using to read this requires thousands of small parts, and cannot be built if a single one of the factories that makes those parts ends up underwater. A new dark age is coming for mankind, all because we are too blind to consider the consequences of our actions.

And the final kick in the pants? People will turn to religion, not science, in this hour of despair, when science is the only hope for our species. Bugger it all, now I'm depressed, too.

edited 4th Nov '11 9:42:45 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

Fixed the spelling.

No, but seriously, is that an actual estimate or just some good old-fashioned guesswork?

In any case, this is worrying news. It's, funnily enough, good news for plants, because the limiting factor during a warm, sunny day is carbon dioxide concentration. But that's not much consolation, as on a large-scale, the difference is not that great.

Naw, long before 2050 we'll relying almost entirely on solar power, and we'll have mastered geoengineering too. Nothing to worry about on that count!

No climate models have really done a good job of including the effects of permafrost retrieval into their predication models, mostly because we lack sufficient data to do so. However, oil companies are interested in another bacterial byproduct from these bogs - methane gas - and they have done a decent job of studying decay rates by hunting for the methane bubbles. Though they haven't specifically studied the carbon release, there has recently been massive releases of methane from the northern tundra, an indication that the permafrost has indeed receeded enough to trigger a massive spike in decay rates. The Russians are so worried about it they want to bring back the wooly mammoth and introduce north american bison into siberia, because the animals' dung works as fertilizer for trees, and they hope that the trees will slow down the release of methane.

Wikipedia does mention that they estimate that a THIRD of the world's carbon is sequestered in tundra, but now that sequestering cycle has stopped and the tundra is a carbon source - a rapidly rising source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra#cite_note-Oechel1993-7

Solar's not a good mobile energy source. It would be fine if we had better batteries, but we don't, and there really isn't much of an economic incentive to make better ones until we reach peak oil - which won't happen for quite some time, if ever, because we keep driving the costs of oil extraction down, making once out of reach oil fields profitable and accessible. The way I see it, our technology tree is so skewed towards oil extraction and transportation that our first contact with aliens will involve a species hoping to trade warp drive for our awesome mining skills.

Like I said, we don't have sufficient data. And the more data we get, the more grim things look. Here's one terrifying truth - we don't know where a third of the carbon dioxide on the planet even GOES after it gets into the atmosphere. We've done careful measurements of the amount released into the atmosphere and the amount extracted, and a third of what the atmosphere loses a year simply ends up somewhere on the planet, but we don't know WHERE. One theory is that its going into the production of new forests - but that possibility is terrifying, because after a certain point it will get too hot for maximized forests growth. Photosynthesis is a chemical reaction, after all, and it has a peak efficiency that is dependant on temperature. If it gets too hot, plants will have a harder time uptaking atmospheric carbon, and then it gets a whole lot worse. That third of the carbon that is currently leaving the atmosphere might start staying in the atmosphere, and we'd have a runaway greenhouse effect on our hands. Earth could even end up like how it is in Terra Nova if that is the case - few plant life able to survive in the heat, over 20% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, end of all hope for humanity or perhaps even the planet itself - that kind of thing.

edited 4th Nov '11 10:06:29 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

I must question why the "worst case scenario" was not actually the worst case scenario.

Meh, this isn't news.

~shrug~

You should care, dude. We should all care. Already this small temperature spike has had profound negative effects on Earth's biosphere - from the death of millions of acres of coral reefs to the die-off of half a continent's worth of forest (North America's, if that matters to you. And its because invasive beetle species are surviving through the winter, now that its warmer out, and heat-stressed forests can't make enough sap to ward their wood-eating larvae off...but I digress). So what happens when the temperature goes up another ten degrees? What will you do when Holland is under water, New York is an island, Bangladesh no longer exists? When people wage wars over water that hasn't been ruined by rising sea levels saturating fresh water sources with salt? When the bulk of every nation on Earth's infrastructure and farmland is ruined by flooding? Or how about when fish are driven extinct and echinoderms reclaim the seas? Are you willing to give up fish for sea urchin?

And at some point, it will get too hot for humans to survive. A recall a recent study finding that by 2150 - if you have grandchildren, they will live to see this - the Earth will simply be too hot for humans to survive exposure, about 120 degrees fahrenheit on an average day. So either we all become mole people and live underground, or we migrate to the North and South Poles. That is a crappy future for humanity, and unless we start giving a damn its one we are forcing on our descendants.

I would advise others not to partake in apocalyptic predictions.

Firstly, while I incline with their point of view, nobody can predict whether it will rain, much less if a new "dark age" is upon us. So just keep the hysteria down to a minimum.

edited 4th Nov '11 10:20:36 PM by johnnyfog

It's actually easier to predict large-scale climate change than day to day events, because long-term events are less subject to random spikes. One reason why it irks me when the local weatherman questions the results of climate scientists.

And frankly, we need the gloom and doom - I'd rather a grim prediction be proven false and have egg on my face, than tone down the alarmist talk and turn out to be wrong. It's shocking to me that governments aren't mobilizing to deal with this threat, when the costs of prevention are so much cheaper than the costs of fixing it all when it gets worse.

Umm... why should we care about this?

Pretty sure he was being sarcastic. We're about as far from "mastering geo-engineering" as one could conceive.

edited 4th Nov '11 10:28:31 PM by ForlornDreamer

Well, the shorter winters are wreaking havoc on forests, since the beetles are mating like mad. But then, importing Chinese longhorn beetles was having the same effect. Meh.

Coral reefs are important for preventing beach erosion, and the algae in coral is amongst the world's largest group of photosynthesizes (you know, it makes the oxygen you breathe).

As for the trees, trees are vital for watersheds as they prevent valuable nutrients from leaking into the water tables and out to sea, reduce wind erosion (dust bowl effects are primarily caused by forest die off or clearcutting), they help cool down the planet by storing carbon and increasing albedo, they are just pretty and nice to frolic in...

x10

Wait a minute, did you just compare the future state of Earth to the state of it during a fictional television series?

That's not the best way to go about convincing people.

edited 4th Nov '11 10:38:34 PM by RedViking

Yes, pretty useful and all. But surely it's more efficient to clear the forests, and colonize it with buildings that convert CO 2 into oxygen like this http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/16/need-more-air-artificial-trees-to-convert-carbon-dioxide-to-oxy/ .

If we don't act now, Earth could become like Seaquest DSV and Roy Scheider will be Pope.

OK, Wonder, you're either trolling now, or are religiously anti-nature. We haven't had an exchange yet, I'm not sure which.

edited 4th Nov '11 10:42:44 PM by johnnyfog

@ Wonderqueer

Well if you cared about only the economy, then the things mentioned have dollar values attached to them. If you want to live a pristine life, wherever you are, you have to depend on the local ecosystem not being a flaming wreckage. Otherwise you suffer more flooding, erosion, poor air quality, poor water quality and poor food quality. If you want to fix those problems it costs money, money that could have been spent making everything else better.

Forests for instance provide an excellent and cheap method of improving air and water quality without us having to do a thing. So when forests are cut down, or die off due to climate change, it has a serious impact on what government has to do to maintain your quality of life.

Okay. Now I am 99% certain you are being trolled. That CO2 artificial tree is still in the prototyping phase. XD

edited 4th Nov '11 10:50:35 PM by ForlornDreamer

x4 Even if you don't care about the environmental impact, the lumber industry is a multi-billion dollar industry in both US and Canada. No forest, no lumber industry.

I'm Deboss and I approve this message.

Wonderqueer: relying on geoengineering and artificial climate control without reducing our energy intake will be, as has been popularly stated in the AGCC circles, like giving a blood transfusion to the victim of a lion attack while the lion's still gnawing on its leg. "Oh shit, it just hit a major artery - pump the blood in faster!"

We can not afford the increased cost in resource gathering and extraction (acquisition of wood, water, etc.) along with the security risks (loss of water and valuable farmland in disputed territories, etc.) that will come with global climate change. The fact that we're making things worse faster than the best scientists on Earth can match their predictions to the data is terrifying.

*yawn* Okay, okay, I'll stuff another sixty pounds of sugar in my basement...

You know, I don't really expect people to live in a constant state of panic because of globe-wide industrial concerns that are beyond the power of any one person to control. But there's something profoundly condescending about people just yawning and shrugging off entire scientific communities who inform them of the profoundly negative effects of a given set of behavior. When they're not telling those scientists to their faces that they're lying.

No one's saying the world has to change the way it does everything overnight, but goddamn, show a bare minimum of healthy respect for the planet that your children and your children's children are (hopefully) going to be living on, at least.

There's enough nuclear weapons around the world to kill us all tomorrow, and nobody even knows how many biological weapons are out there thanks to Soviet stupidity.

Frankly, global warming is just too long-term an issue to get worked up about. I just throw it on the metaphorical pile behind me of "fucked up shit we need to get around to."