There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. NPR ran a story[0] where Russian animals such as reindeer infected with Anthrax had thawed out, and caused outbreaks where people had to get preventative treatments against it. As a future threat model, what if there's new viruses or bacterium contained under previously frozen earth for which modern medicine isn't prepared for?
"...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters."
I think part of it is that this comes near the end of the book and a lot of it is referring to stuff that had previously been established, and part of it is that the style of writing that was en vogue a century ago is kind of hard to read today. I mean, here's a bit from the beginning of the contemporary classic Ulysses:
> Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
It's pretty writing, but it is also pretty hard to read if you're used to the way people write nowadays.
Basically everything they teach you in school is ignored by successful authors at times, but you've got to know the rules before you can know when to break them.
If you really truly got absolutely nothing from that, I suggest you perhaps read it again, more slowly, and try to evoke your mind's eye. Maybe try reading one of his books; it's difficult to get into the right mindset from just an excerpt like that.
I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft some 25 years ago, and I still have vivid imagined visual memories of the “unspeakable ancient horrors” described. Given this background, I find it strange that someone would get, or see, “absolutely nothing”.
I'd say H.P. Lovecraft is the literary equivalent of H.R. Giger. Different sub-genre of fiction, of course, but they've both contributed a similarly unique genre-defining take on things.
I think people back then spent more time over their reading. Nowadays we expect easily digestible text we can speed through or skim. When reading something like that it pays to slam on the brakes and take some time over it.
"Lovecraftian" is still used as a general term for an entire genre of fiction. He was a xenophobe, but that is not what he's best known for. Similarly, Aristotle was a misogynist, but it would not be accurate to say that Aristotle is best known as a navel-gazing misogynist.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Lovecraft is fundamentally about confronting modernism and the inevitable decay of humanity in the faces of forces beyond our control. Central to that is the decay of the Anglo-Saxon genetic stock.
Xenophobic isn't quite the right word. Racist is closer, but even that misses the mark. Every story he writes is terrified of black voodoo savages, or toothless white hill people, or inbred decadent Boston brahmin families, or fishermen that are half-white-half-Chinese-half-fish.
Aristotle, by contrast, isn't that concerned with gender. He is happy to treat it as a topic, but he has nowhere near the same level of preoccupation.
The story in question, At the Mountains of Madness, isn't about any of those things. It's about an Antarctic expedition that finds the ruins of an ancient civilization, which they gradually realize wasn't built by humans.
I do think you're right that Lovecraft's ability to write effective horror was largely because he himself was fascinated with terror at the world. But I don't think his weird xenophobia is what he ended up actually communicating to most readers or what he's famous for. He's more known for misshapen tentacle monsters and cosmic-scale horror. For example, Lauren Beukes' novel Broken Monsters is often considered Lovecraftian horror, and it has fairly modern sensibilities.
He had an imaginative genius and a capability to create worlds but he was a bad writer plain and simple. He writes poorly but he has massive emotional and psychological force.
Someone born in 1890 like Lovecraft would have been educated in the early 1900s where it was all about the White Race superiority to all other ones (check school books of the time) on top of hundreds of years of such thinking, so my guess is that you'd find people thinking like Lovecraft pretty much everywhere in his time. And regarding antisemitism, it's not like Lovecraft was an exception, antisemitism was rampant in early 20th century. So while Lovecraft was vocal about it in his letters, I doubt his peers and folks of his time would have very, very different.
I make my argument from his work, not from history. And I am responding specifically to the word Xenophobe. I think Houellebecq's analysis[1] is correct - the force of his work derives from the very extreme nature of his Xenophobia, which is personal and psychological in nature rather than ideological. Certainly he garlanded it with all the ideological backup he could find, but I don't think that's where it came from.
Downvoted by those who must have fantasized that I abhor poetic repetition and therefore don't like Lovecraft's writing. I adore poetry, and only the most admirable poetry can leverage and benefit from repetition. It's a terrific passage. However, perhaps it's understandable that Lovecraft fans would reflexively indulge in a fantasy about what I wrote and why, however...
I'm sure you, the guy who writes snarky tweets and codes web forms, have a lot more going for you in the annals of history than an internationally recognized titan of literature.
Maybe not, but it was inspiring; people like Guillermo del Toro wouldn't have had their style or whatnot if it wasn't for Lovecraft. (speaking of, he still wants to do a Mountains of Madness movie)
I’m not th OP, but, still, doesn’t change the fact that his stuff is hard for me to digest.
I don’t care how many stars a chef has. If his food is hard for me to swallow, well, I don’t like his cooking. And that’s okay. I don’t have to eat his food. And I don’t have to read Lovecraft’s works. And I don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate to have an opinion. And you don’t have to listen to my opinion.
Oh, then we're probably safe - he was only worried about the Antarctic:
"I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic — with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap — and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left."
This was always one of my favorite lines of Lovecraft. It's the sense of hopelessness that he manages to get into his writing that really sets the atmosphere more than just about any other writer I know of, other than perhaps Clive Barker.
Penguin is also an old name for an auk or puffin; it didn't become a name for what are now called penguins until after Europeans got down there to see them, and didn't become exclusively the name for them until quite recently. So no reason, really, not to be afraid. Lovecraft would have preferred it that way.
> what if there's new viruses or bacterium contained under previously frozen earth for which modern medicine isn't prepared for?
A group at Harvard found that the traits that now enable enterococcal survival and transmission in hospitals were an advantage in the Paleozoic [0] and suggest that the multidrug resistant (i.e., untreatable) strains seen in hospitals were trained to be that way millions of years ago. There was also a split between commensal/friendly and unfriendly enterococci around the time of urbanization. So it's certainly possible that we'd encounter something we don't have an answer for. It has already been seen, in a way.
Or, what if every of those bacteries whose evolution stopped thousands of years ago are simply completely inapt to compete with the ones we've got today, because those had much more time to evolve ?
I would bet on a medium-sized to big, healthy dog against a velociraptor. Raptors were around the size of a turkey. Might not be an easy fight, though.
Velociraptors have two rows of teeth in addition to a 2.5" retractable middle claw theorized to be used for slashing or stabbing attacks. Many dogs would have a size advantage, but all would have fewer teeth and generally soft padded paws with no serious claws. Even with the smaller size, the Velociraptors seemingly have the advantage. The "Fighting Dinosaurs" fossils give some credence to the claw being used to pierce the neck of a prey animal: https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/fighting-dinos/the-fighting...
Something like maybe a Rodesian Ridgeback (lion hunting dogs) might stand a good chance however.
Met my first Rodesian Ridgeback (god that's such a dragon name) about a year ago. He was youngish but still ~3 ft at the shoulder, tall enough that he had to lower his head to sniff my crotch (and I'm 6' tall), which he was very interested in (I'm male). Owner didn't discipline or train him at all. I think he was just supposed to guard the horses, and fuck anyone else who wandered onto the property. Pretty friendly right up until he decided he didn't like me any more.
First time I've been scared of a dog since I was three. When a pit gets mad at you, you can kind of convince yourself you can keep it down by kicking and pushing it.
Your neck is out of its immediate range unless you fall down. The Rodey was big and heavy enough that I would have had basically zero time to react if he jumped up.
Humans are just so squishy. If you can throw a good punch, you can knock out 99% of people with one good hit to the chin. A strong hit to the liver will incapacitate anyone and kill them without treatment. Unlucky hits to the face can kill people as well.
I was very acutely aware that no matter how hard I hit that dog, I wouldn't be able to knock it out and my only option was basically to let it chew on me while I tried to hurt it as much as possible. Just keep punching anything that looks soft until it decided I wasn't worth biting, and do my best to keep it away from my neck and nuts.
Punching a large dog wouldn't do much of anything to it, as you allude to. The largest muscle in your body is in your legs, your quadriceps in specific. A Tae Kwon Do (my primary martial art) front snap kick or Muay Thai style semi-circle round kick to the face or ribs (as they leap) could incapacitate them. If you are able to hit them before they have ahold of you, that initial crushing blow might prevent them from wrecking you. That said, I'd NEVER want to try even after 8+ years of martial arts. Much like a knife fight, the standard isn't whether you got stabbed or not, but if you lived. It would be rough regardless!
Those are huge dogs and aren't afraid to scrap. I'd still happily take on one of them for my life given the choice vs a velociraptor :)
We have wild turkeys near us. My chocolate lab went a couple rounds with a mother turkey this spring. First couple of encounters went to the mama turkey as she was defending her babies and my dog was just terrified of her. She would spread her wings (6-8 feet wide or so?) and then hover above him. He would freak out and back away, terrified. Eventually the dog got brave, chased her off and ate a couple of turkey babies. But based on that interaction, I definitely would NOT bet on a lab taking down a velociraptor. The raptor would have gone for the kill when the dog was still scared..
Yes, turkeys (wild or domestic) have spurs. Typically an inch or so in length, up to a bit more than two inches for the biggest, oldest birds. They also have interesting beards, which can be 10 inches long!
They'll bluster and charge to defend young against a curious city dog, but will flee up to roost if challenged by a pack of hunting dogs. If you find a cornered turkey, don't try to catch it or let your dog attack: you'll probably win from sheer mass and from having predatory weapons, but you will be badly bloodied.
I don't know about velociraptors, but there probably is a Creodont species that was pushed to extinction by ancestors of dogs. I mean it is believed that Creodonts disappeared due to the concurrence of the Carnivora order.
The idea that more recent species are "more evolved" than ancient ones is not completely absurd.
You got it backwards, birds are now dinosaurs. The world just got that much cooler. If you're not convinced, look through YouTube for videos of my favorite dinosaur, the raven.
Mainly just that ravens are awesome, and velociraptors are awesome, so Q.E.D. Not really a scientific argument.
I do wonder how many Cretaceous critters were intelligent to the degree of ravens or dogs or primates, if any. We know they weren't as good at terraforming as we are, or there'd be some evidence in the strata. But the Cretaceous was longer than the current period, so I wouldn't be shocked if something we could call intelligent evolved.
Mutation takes place very quickly once the revived microorganism makes contact with the outside world. I would think the outcome is highly unpredictable.
That's not really how it works. You could equally argue that those ancient bacteria have attack methods that our modern bacteria has forgotten about, making them even more dangerous
> There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet.
This is stupid. A medical waste dump from "decades" ago leads to issues..... How do we jump to this science fiction and quotes below from NPR of unbelievable????
"Officials don't know exactly how the outbreak started, but the current hypothesis is almost unbelievable: A heat wave has thawed the frozen soil there and with it, a reindeer carcass infected with anthrax decades ago."
Waste dumps from the past cause issues in the future.. How on earth is this unbelievable? How is it even related to global warming? They dug a hole when it was cold, it got warmer in summer one year and defrosted?
It also only killed one person. And we were prepared for it. This makes for a crappy SciFi novel by any standards.
Humans prior to modern times haven't ever exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment and haven't had a die out that substantially reduced our population in modern times.
Your thesis other than being fictional also is an emotional appeal to the concept that what is natural is desirable which is wholly unsound both on its face and because any die out sufficient to be effective is entirely likely to not only take civization with it but also reduce our ability to take effective measures to manage our environment as our technology dies with our civilaztion.
The way forward to a managable population size is through raising everyone up to a relaively modern level and the way forward to that population living sustainably is via education.
Edit: Your philosophy that its ok for the more developed nations to wreck the environment leading to mass death presumably among those you regard as your inferiors while relax and have a latte safe behind our metaphorical walls is pure insanity.
Humans prior to modern times haven't ever exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment
Can you provide a citation for this? My understanding is that humanity have spent most of its history near the carrying capacity of the environment -- world population was very stable, and the major increases in population happened due to humans figuring out new ways to increase the carrying capacity (e.g through farming), or lucking out into them (e.g. through lactose tolerance genes). At least, could you specify what excatly you mean by "modern times"?
Original poster "Such events are necessary to keep human population under a manageable number. Throughout human history there have been outbreaks that claimed many lives and stunted population growth for some time"
The black death was a singular public health crisis precipitated by sanitation not an example of the world population periodically resetting to a manageable level.
I am not unaware of the black death I just don't think it represents an example of what poster is arguing for.
Education is not the savior. There is a physical limit to resources here on this Earth. There is only so much food we can make, only so many jobs we can create.
The only way to manage population is to control breeding. That is not a scaleable solution.
Well... not directly. But in societies with more education, the birth rate is lower. Some countries have already dipped below a self-sustaining birth rate.
Unless you can educate the world that the Earth has limited carrying capacity and that GDP and population growth aren't necessarily the be-all and end-all.
I don't know. I didn't suggest immigration control. I assume the parent meant they would deport people to regions where survival is much less guaranteed.
Philosophical positions that you can't defend are mental masterbation without a payoff at the end. They aren't worth the time required to post them on this site.
Ok, but what about philosophical positions that CAN be defended? For example, your statement is a philosophical position in itself, no? A position, I assume, you believe to be "defensible?"
The answer to 2+2 has an infinite number of wrong answers. Finding the correct way to answer the question gives us a tool in our tool box that we can use to add any 2 numbers.
Through defensible positions even if we ultimately believe the conclusion is wrong we learn new ways to reason about life and the world around us. New tools to inform our interaction with the world or at least new thought processes to communicate with our fellow humans.
The bald statement that 2+2 = 17 or even that 2+2=4 is worth nothing if you can't explain why you think its correct.
It's not a given that such events are necessary because human population growth has already slowed down and will continue doing so as more of the world becomes developed. Furthermore, technological advancement can increase the number of people the planet can support. So, while there is definitely some population strain, it's far from certain that human overpopulation will result in catastrophe without events like this.
The former. At our current consumption levels/technology, we are obviously above our planet's current carrying capacity.
This is not controversial. We are living on borrowed time - our civilization currently relies on the consumption of non-renewable resources, and the non-sustainable consumption of renewable resources.
Even if this is sustainable for 10, 20, or 100 years, it is not sustainable for longer time horizons.
It's worth pointing out that for developed economies like the US, UK, and Japan, the amount of per capita energy usage is the lowest it has been in decades:
This may be at least in part due to the shifting of energy-intensive industries to countries like China, but it does show that countries can continue to grow their GDP (per capita) while dropping their energy usage per capita, which bodes well for the future.
The Clathrate gun hypothesis and the thawing of the Arctic ecosystem are two of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" that the US government investigates. These are possible scenarios for abrupt climate change (aka tipping points). The other two involve antarctic ice sheet instability and megadroughts in North America.
It's definitely not the same problem. Clathrates are methane, for one thing, and the permafrost issue will cause CO2 emissions. Clathrates are in the water, permafrost is soil.
They are both associated with historically cold environments that are now warming up, but each has its own mechanism and likely impacts (clathrates may be worse, since methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, but the permafrost melting is going to be with us for 1000's of years whereas methane will be with us for "only" a decade. Also permafrost is likely to be a potent methane producer as well while it thaws out.
Methane turns into CO2 and water vapor over time as it reacts with other stuff in the air. It takes about 10 years for atmospheric methane to turn into something other than methane.
Yep. The caveat is that we are currently adding methane at a faster rate than it is lost through this process, which obviously means methane concentrations are increasing right now, and early signs are that this may accelerate. Sigh.
They are both examples of positive feedback loops that result in abrupt changes to the climate, yes. But, because they are different systems, the feedback loops behave differently. Methane trapped in sea ice is studied and modeled separately from organisms frozen in arctic permafrost.
The sad thing is that scientists have understood the risks of global warming for decades, and yet our civilization (maybe I'm just speaking for the US here) seems impotent to effectively coordinate a response to this slow-motion threat.
Are there credible models that suggest Earth will turn into Venus or something? It would take a hell of a lot more to end humanity than it would take to "merely" hurt/kill the most vulnerable segments of our population (which is what I thought the stakes were).
No, the Earth has been a lot warmer and colder in the past. We've had massive volcanoes going off for thousands of years, we've had iceball earth, we've had crocodiles and palm trees in the arctic.
The Earth's systems always balance out over the long run. We don't stay trapped in ice ages or hot phases.
The difference is that civilization is a comparatively new development, and nobody really knows how that's going to fare in the face of all this. The human cost is likely to be staggering.
We're uncertain about the rarity of global collapse due to climate change. The more uncertain we are about our uncertainty of the rarity of a global catastrophe, the more rational it is for us to assume we are likely presently under-estimating its rarity, rather than over-estimating it, because examples of global catastrophe are pretty hard to come by. If nobody knows if it's gonna happen, but the consequence of catastrophe is so bad that it disrupts life as we know it, that means that our uncertainty about our uncertainty of its probability should increase our willingness to defend against its potential ~ -inf payoff, rather than decrease our willingness to.
The thing is, not only is there reasonable evidence that climate change is occurring - which reduces the hesitation to actually spend money protecting against it - but also that it's a problem that concerns pretty much every country.
> The more uncertain we are about our uncertainty of the rarity of a global catastrophe, the more rational it is for us to assume we are likely presently under-estimating its rarity
It took me a long while to come up with a response to this I liked, but think about it this way: there is, maybe, a 10^-a prior climate change destroys life as we know it, right? But my prior for God, heaven, etc existing is, alas, 10^-b, where b >>>>>>>>>>>>> a. (never a 0 or 1 prior kinda guy, even if I know that is dumb in some scenarios, like tautologies and impossibilities, yadada). Too many more factors would have to be revealed to me in terms of the existence of God that I would then believe that a is of similar value to b, if that makes sense? ie that they have similar probabilities (or rather, utilities, which matters since heaven is probably +inf and catastrophe of all life is MAX(badness) which we might as well call -inf, right?
So, not only is -Cost * P(calamity | investment) >> -Cost * P(calamity | not investment), Cost(investment) < [Cost(calamity | no investment) -
Cost(calamity | w investment)], so its a rational purchase...
sorry if this is at all unclear, i can clarify anything
Think of it as Pascal's wager. We are talking about catastrophy here, the cost function is quite out of balance when looking at the alternative of "Reducing our standard of living a bit even though the catastrophy would not have happend anyway".
A village that lives entirely off its own subsistence farming, or a band that lives off hunting and gathering, can keep chugging along in merry ignorance of any catastrophe that does not destroy the local food supply (and if one does, they can pick up and move).
A society that depends for daily survival upon massive global flows of food, goods, and information is vulnerable to anything that disrupts those flows.
Even relatively minor changes throw our civilization and economy into panic and disarray. Drought in the Middle East is considered one of the factors that led to the rise of ISIS [0]. But it's not the first time. Drought led to poor harvest which led to the French Revolution when grain prices got too high [1].
If you're wondering why the Netherlands has to reclaim land from the sea, if you wonder where it all went, it was a result of the Little Ice Age and a storm that devastated Northern Europe and washed much the of area out to sea [2].
Of course all of this happened outside of our modern worries about climate change... but it shows even "natural" changes in weather patterns can cause serious economic and cultural upheaval. What we're being warned of right now is far more serious and massive than we've ever seen before, including during all the time periods where drought and famine and storms have famously killed hundreds/thousands before [3].
All you can do is assume the worst. We've seen the impacts throughout history, we're dealing with some of them now. Northern Europe is still paying off the mitigation of the storm that destroyed their land... that storm happened 800 years ago. They'll be paying it off forever.
If we have the ability to stop things like the Little Ice Age or the drought that caused the French Revolution, we should. Right now we're being warned of something like that, but many many times more dramatic. And we have a chance to slow it down. We need to take that chance.
There's a really good George Carlin bit in one of his stand-ups about how the earth will be fine. Something along the lines of what you're saying; earthquakes, volcanoes, solar flares, etc. She's been around for a looong time folks. It's humanity that might be in for a bad day.
The difference with the past is that the sun is slowly getting hotter. Increasing the incoming solar power by a mere 10% would be enough to tip the climate into a runaway process that will boil the oceans and scour the surface. Our Earth only has a billion more years to go
All stars become gradually hotter the older they get. G-type stars like our sun are no exception to this. On a certain point in time (currently estimated at 1Gy from now), the energy output of our sun is so big, that the Carbonate–silicate cycle[0] cannot continue uninterrupted. Thus CO2 and CO cannot be absorbed by the geosphere. The breaking of this process will gradually enrich the atmosphere with CO2, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect (a bit like on Venus).
But I would not worry about that. It took 500My for life to evolve from trilobites to humans. This timespan is twice as long...
In about a billion years the sun will exhaust enough nuclear fuel to cool and expand, boiling the oceans, blowing off our atmosphere, and turning Earth back into a sterile rock.
It's predicted by astronomers and physicists who study stellar evolution.
The models from 20 years ago overshot by several confidence intervals because they underestimated mixing the deep ocean. "The barrel is bigger than we expected" doesn't make the rising water in the barrel any less concerning, but it's not the triumph of foresight that you seem to imply.
Grandparent didn't imply it was a triumph of foresight, but rather a failure of foresight.
I think that's what he's saying - a general point that people's understanding of climate (and thus predictions about it) are poorer than commonly believed.
Well, one day we might realize that we underestimated some critical aspect of climate change. Having overestimated it in the past is not an argument for relaxing today, and is certainly not a laughing matter.
I mean per the other response that is how you build models like this aka yes, all of them. Source: Am a Statistician
edit: that doesn't mean they are correct going forward necessarily and most of the doomsday models I've seen are simulations that run thousands of times and a very small number of the simulations predict doom and a very small number predict no effects. The average of these expiriments is often the most likely scenario but doesn't really make headlines.
I don't need models when I have the historical record. The historical record says mean sea level is going to be hundreds of _meters_ above current levels in the not-too-distant future.
> I don't need models when I have the historical record. The historical record says mean sea level is going to be hundreds of _meters_ above current levels in the not-too-distant future.
What in the historical record says this?
Edit: saw your reply to my sibling after I posted this.
Feel free to do your own research, obviously. You are looking for eustatic sea level during PETM (Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum).
You will likely find a lot of studies which show coral reefs and anything that lives in the ocean and has a shell is about to have an even worse time of it than we are!
(To be clear, hundreds is the most extreme value -- the variability at different sites is fairly high, but roughly 50m is the minimum.)
This is why people don't listen to the scientists, because absurd FUD like this gets spread and it discredits the entire movement. Even the most doomsday predictions are on the order of inches, maybe over a foot in the next 50 years. Such a rise would still be incredibly devastating, don't get me wrong, but it would take about a hundred years of a completely runaway warming cycle to raise the seas a single meter, much less hundreds.
I'm quite serious about the historical record. This is not FUD, this is data. The historical record shows that the last time atmospheric CO2 concentration was at the level we are at currently, several things were true. 1) temperatures were 4-5C higher. 2) there was no permanent surface ice anywhere on the planet as far as they can tell. 3) mean eustatic sea level was anywhere from 50 to 200m above current levels.
Keep in mind, it's not just melting you need to figure in, there's also the thermal expansion of water.
Also models do not currently project the Antarctic losing all of its ice, yet this is what the historical record suggests is likely. The models also do not account or undercount the contribution of non-anthropogenic forcing factors such as the one this article refers to -- they assume that _we_ are the main feedback loop, and yet there is evidence that we have entered a regime where we could reduce emissions to zero and the non-anthropogenic feedback would continue to add CO2 and methane to the atmosphere at a rate equal to or exceeding our current emissions.
I believe the main reason you aren't hearing things like this is because scientists are picking their most defensible claims because they know that they will be hounded by climate change deniers. They are not talking about their worst fears, for worry of being labeled FUD.
When I read the paragraph 55 of the article, I think that it tells a different story. Basically, it's 20-30 meters higher seas; a good part of it coming from tectonic stuff. And they also say that sea level increase appeared before warming.
The volume of the ocean basin is something that I haven’t been able to find data for one way or the other. The timeline is different — there is a lot of data and of course it doesn’t all line up perfectly. The generally accepted reference timeline, which is based on a single south Atlantic core sample, is calculated using an assumption about the annual rate of sediment deposition. There is evidence that mid ocean sediment deposition dropped during PETM while coastal deposition increased. This is likely because the oceans become inhospitable due to increasing acidity and warming caused the same thing we see today — increased evaporation rate and warmer air being able to hold more moisture as water vapor leads to increased rainfall and therefore river flows increased generally. There have been attempts to try and correct for this factor using iron deposition variability which may correlate with planetary precession and other techniques, some of which change the timeline fairly drastically at the scale we’re talking about.
Long story short — yes this is an oddity but there’s not a well accepted explanation for it and there is reason to question whether we have the PETM timeline correct for the area of interest. (the onset is quite sudden, geologically speaking, although not as sudden as the data we are producing right now!) I would encourage you to do more reading and build an opinion based on the sum of evidence rather than that one paper, which I linked to simply because it has an accessible graph for sea level variability compared to today.
I think the worst case scenario is the rising of the sea level by tens of meters over decades, destroying all coastal cities. Think the Syrian refugee crisis, but hundreds of times more people.
I agree, but the US (and Canada, Australia, etc), still pollute twice more per capita than China. There's still a lot we can do. The EU, however, has lower per capita emissions than China. And that's ignoring that most manufactured goods we consume are made in China.
It's like whack a mole. The economy is a global system, and so is the atmosphere. Shifting production of carbon between the parts isn't per se useful.
We can no more blame other countries for increasing CO2 output than we can blame a grocery store down the block from opening when another closes (or, refuses to cater to new demand, to make a better analogy).
We'll only stop if we come up with an unambiguously better alternative, or something forces us. A acute problem is that if we stopped using carbon, people would die. (And the economy would contract, of course, but death is a stronger motivator).
We're above our carrying capacity without carbon use. But if we keep using it, we die, later.
I think the most no brainer approach is to push for a global carbon tax to prod development of renewables. Income taxes could be cut to offset, so at a low level this wouldn't hurt a country. This seems not very popular however, and no one has pushed for an international agreement on this point, instead pushing for whack a mole emissions reductions in single countries.
My most optimistic scenario is we do figure out an unambiguously better alternative, switch to it, and then also figure out some way to use the energy to suck carbon from the atmosphere (which has its own challenges).
It's all about discount rate for stuff in the future. If you spend money to mitigate future damage, that's money that you can't invest productively. So basically, in economic terms, the distant future is worthless.
Capitalism needs additional constraints or it will end all civilization. Simply, the cost of creating greenhouse gasses has never been priced in to the market since Exxon and the likes have lobbied hard for decades to not let the truth gain any traction. They should all be in jail and there should be no profits in destroying ecosystems. Otherwise there seems no hope.
In a socialized system you'd have the same thing, except perpetuated by bureaucrats instead of businessmen.
If anything, capitalism has an advantage in that it's at least theoretically possible to mitigate the effect of greed on politics. Throwing all your eggs into the government basket gives you no such recourse.
The general population controls so little of the economic might that this just isn't true. We could pool our votes to change the course of politics. If we pooled our dollars nobody would care.
There's nothing stopping you from pooling your votes right now.
Ownership of capital has basically nothing to do with it. If the means of production are owned by "the workers", all that ends up happening is each group of workers sends a representative to manage their share of the means of production. Unless you have a true Athenian direct democracy, it reduces to exactly the same system, just less diversified.
The Volkswagen emissions scandal demonstrated that mitigating effects will be circumvented given the presence of a profit motive. Rather than construct an elaborate and exploitable maze of incentives, perhaps it would be simpler to remove the profit motive.
And yet capitalism gives us the greatest hope we have: companies like Tesla, and products like solar panels and wind turbines. None of that would exist without capitalism.
There're two statements without any proof:
1) that only capitalist system can create electrical cars and solar panels (obviosly false)
2) that electric vehicles and solar panels are good for the nature (there's not enough data, but to manufacture both you need a lot energy and materials, and not all electricity is created by clean sources)
In all countries that matter, governments are elected. And they do what they need to do to be elected for the next term.
Assuming they really swept global warming under the rug, they did it because accounting for it was unpopular. We prefer to vote for a candidate that won't reduce our comfort rather than one who decides to tackle a problem most people don't really understand.
We are the ones to blame, governments just gave us what we wanted.
> In all countries that matter, governments are elected.
Well, except China, and Russia, two very large industrial nations that certainly matter in terms of global impact. You're kidding yourself if you believe those governments are elected.
> We are the ones to blame, governments just gave us what we wanted.
No, governments are giving their sponsors what they want. The electorate is led to believe they want it too.
This isn't solely the purview of governments, there are other institutions involved, including many corporations, and the specific individuals behind them. Arguably the financial world, various inter-national rivalries, media, public opinion, religions, and more.
On the one hand, if it succeeds in offing some element of, take your pick: modernity, liberal democracy, advanced civilisation, humanity, life on earth, terrifying as all get out. On the other, a maddeningly fascinating systems dysfunction at work.
Though on the whole, I'd prefer the tuition bill for this course were lower.
US emissions have plateaued two decades ago [0]. Emissions are growing unchecked elsewhere, a combination of population explosion and rapid industrialization.
Just because emissions aren't growing doesn't mean the US should do nothing, especially considering our outsized historical contributions that have lead to current CO2 levels.
As one of the largest emitters per capita(more than double CO2e pp vs the EU), and at almost 15% of world emissions, there's a ton that can be done.
A few items that are huge emission sources and could use some attention:
* The reliance on single occupancy cars (94% of commuters) with poor gas mileage and long commutes
* Heavy meat and dairy consumption leading to big agriculture emissions (especially methane from cattle)
* Dominance of low quality, single family home construction that ignores local climate - poorly insulated 2x4 houses everywhere, average building is overly reliant on always on AC or furnace
Per capita, USA emissions have declined by 21% since 1980 [0]. Is it enough? No! All the items you're suggesting should be tackled.
But we can't have an adult conversation only focusing on one element of the equation and literally ignoring the elephants in the room. The total emissions of USA are 14.34%. Cutting them to zero would be insufficient to stop the global growth to CO2 in the atmosphere. Worse, in a few years the emissions of the rest of the world would grow to compensate the zero-emissions USA and we'd be back to square one.
I have yet to see a realistic plan for a carbon-balanced world economy even in a zero-emissions USA scenario.
I'm curious if the various ways American's and America spends it's money and consumes its good is factored into U.S. emissions.
Does the carbon it takes to produce an iphone and then ship it here count? What about all the fuel/power used by military bases abroad? Does our purchasing of Foreign cars count?
Under most measures it isn't counted. What you are looking for is called consumption-based emissions accounting and unsurprisingly it shows US emissions are still going up.
Moving to consumption based accounting aligns closely with the generally accepted best economic solution for reducing emissions - a global carbon tax, which would be pushed onto developing countries as a requirement when they want to export to developed countries.
Incidentally, the US military has been exempt from all climate agreements since Kyoto, and so are international flights.
I don't know why you're downvoted. The RCPs that show us respecting the goal of the 2C limit all show emissions need to shrink globally and reach zero around 2050 or even earlier. The fact emissions have stopped growing is not really much progress. It is like we are cruising to disaster rather than accelerating towards it.
Probably because there is no practical plan to reduce them to zero. There's much hand-wringing about future technologies, but the reality of it is that it will require drastic reduction in consumption.
Very unlikely that is the case. You are assuming that clean technologies will produce only economic cost not a net economic benefit. But that's not how technology works generally
Getting to net zero emissions means turning off many perfectly functioning power plants before their intended life. It means any emissions that are practically impossible to remove (eg aviation due to the high energy density fuel required) need to be balanced out by negative emissions, which remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere. This inherently (thermodynamically) has a huge cost and little economic benefit (unless you include externalities like environmental effects).
I suggest reading/watching any recent talk by Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Institute, and this paper for an overview:
Great, what is the national road-map for our transition to these net-beneficial clean technologies? If they are net-beneficial, why haven't we transitioned to them yet? What factors blocking this transition will be removed in the years to come, and how exactly are we going to remove them? What decade we going to hit net zero carbon?
It's like a startup saying: "Well, sure, we are losing money hand over fist, and our per-unit economics don't make sense, but you're assuming that we won't discover... Something... that will make us profitable."
What exactly do self-driving cars have to do with reducing our carbon footprint?
Hell, self-driving cars are the absolutely wrong solution to this problem. Personal automobiles - a 4,000lb steel and rubber box that drives a single 160lb human around, are incredibly wasteful, energy-inefficient luxuries. Trains, buses, bicycles, and better urban planning are the real solution to low-carbon personal transportation.
There's no roadmap in America for any of those things.
Self-driving cars might make using taxis cheaper than owning a car, which will mean car users don't have to worry about how long it takes to recharge an electric car's batteries any more, or what their range is.
Electric cars (when their batteries are plugged into the grid) could also potentially make a good distributed battery, making renewable energy sources seem more reliable.
There is a good recent article about the battery system Tesla set up in Australia:
I think saying stuff like this should be avoided. There is almost no chance that civilization will be destroyed. There will be major problems but the world won't go under. By making up total doom scenarios credibility of climate change proponents goes down a lot in my view.
We tend to believe our current level of civilization is stable because it got never challenged by climate changing this fast. Probably it is not about ending all human culture but about rolling back decades or centuries in a lot of regions. I remember how Sandy interrupted gas supply in New York. People took extreme measurements to get what was 'needed' - civilized was something different.
Just because English lacks the ability to adequately express the far-reaching consequences of untackled Climate Change shouldn't stop us from trying to get the message around. If you think there are better phrases, don't keep them for yourself.
Also permanent advertisement has exploited the alarming features of language. Do you really still expect to trigger immediate action by saying 'please'?
If you want climate change to be taken seriously don't use half-hearted language. Otherwise it's too easy for the problem to be called insignificant and nothing will happen.
Unfortunately no matter what strategy is taken, someone will complain at how the message is phrased.
Note that it said "civilization", not "human kind". Fast climate change could innudate coastal regions, forcing mass migrations inland. Fast climate change may exceed agriculture's ability to adapt, leading to food shortages.
If the starving workers that keep infrastructure running (power plants, sewage plants, municipal water suppliers, etc) decide to go hunt for food instead of work, then that infrastructure may fail.
Once basic infrastructure fails, it won't take long for civilization to collapse too.
Our systems of civil society are fairly robust, but at some point those major problems become greater than our ability to cope. Unfortunately, "almost no chance" and "no chance" are not the same thing.
It just seems highly unlikely to me. Even if 90% of the world becomes uninhabitable there is still plenty of space left for a lot of people. You can lose 90% or even 99% of world population and will still have a lot of people left. Not saying this is a good thing but I just don't believe civilization will get totally wiped out. Emphasis is on "totally".
I think you are equating "human civilization" with "humanity". I agree that some people are likely to survive a catastrophe, but I don't think that what we think of as civilization is likely to survive a 90% or 99% population reduction.
Or as lifeformed put it elsewhere: "Destroying all civilization doesn't mean destroying all humans, but just the structures that hold society together. A runaway heating scenario may be a pretty effective way of doing that - all crops die, wars for food, nukes get used."
Let's say temps rise by 10 degrees and sea levels rise a lot. I would think there will still be a lot of areas that will be inhabitable. I don't think that the atmosphere will become unbreathable. I think you can have a pretty sophisticated civilization with 100 million or even 10 million people.
Again, I am not saying these things are OK. We should worry about displacing millions of people and probably wars but civilization dying seems overblown and damaging to the argument that we should be doing something.
Of course the planet will be inhabitable. Will there be any of us to inhabit it? Or will war break out because of population migration due to the effects of climate change? I don't know the answer to the first question, but the second one is easy -- it's already happening.
These are important issues but I still doubt civilization will get destroyed. Let's warn of likely scenarios. These are bad enough. No need for exaggeration that then can easily be refuted.
Africa is undergoing a mass migration leading to local wars. The Middle East is subject to the same pressure. There’s plenty of evidence that this is directly leading to European immigration and the rise of nationalist movements. None of this is exaggerated — it is current reality.
Does anyone have any good resources on why humans do this. Some christians love to talk about the book of revelations. There's a huge segment of the population in the US that loves the idea of a zombie apocalypse. What is the human fascination with the world ending?
Directly to corpMav's post. Settle down buddy. 8 and 9 won't happen unlesss the earth get's hit by an asteroid of epic proportions or is finally consumed by an ever expanding sun.
And 6 and 7 are also extremely unlikely, to a point of being laughable.
"all human civilization"? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic? destructive, sure. It would certainly lead to a lot of death, and a lot of hardship. Human civilization will certainly be changed- perhaps significantly. But I haven't see any evidence that it will cease to exist.
The resilience of humanity may actually be inversely proportional to its population.
Yonatan Zunger, of Google, writing nearly five years ago, tossed out a fact that's stuck with me since: the response of "large animal" populations to global temperature changes:
"When the biota of a planet get rewritten, the creatures that require the most delicate maintenance die first. This tends to mean really big creatures, that rely on large supplies of their foods; apex predators, which rely on the entire food chain beneath them; and "canary" species like many frogs, which are very sensitive and tend to be the first to die when something is going wrong. Historically, the cutoff for "large creatures" (that tend to not survive extinction events) seems to be in the ballpark of 20 pounds; things bigger than that just require the ecosystem to be too healthy."
That immediately following:
"The last big spike like this was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Average temperatures rose by 6C over a period of 20,000 years -- which is enough to look like a giant, sharp spike on the history-of-the-entire-planet graph."
We're on track to temperature changes of roughly that order of magnitude, and almost certainly in a far shorter period of time -- a few centuries, perhaps less.
I think that there is a swarming aspect to humanity, in the sense of locusts or passenger pigeons.
Here's what I mean by that: For some species the survivability rate is inverse to the population density- the habitat fills up and a natural equilibrium results. But for other species there is a range of population densities where the survivability rate is positively correlated with population- so the more you have, the better they survive. Any species that moves in large herds is like that- the predators get full, they can't eat any more, and the dent the predators can make on the population is negligible. We are like that too; the more of us there are, the more we can specialize tasks and support each other, and the faster our population increases. (Up to some limit).
Swarming species are more delicate than they look though- passenger pigeons are a good example. Once some external force pushes the population below a certain level, the remainder have a much much harder time surviving. I don't know if people appreciate how easily a good nuclear war could cause the total extinction of humanity- once we lose the big interconnected economy, with all the easy to find resources gone, we could really be f*ed.
If that is true, and there may be a point, you might want to consider what the specific evolutionary benefit mechanism of that swarming behaviour is, and what its costs are.
In the case of passenger pigeons (now extinct) and locusts (not a species but a behavioural mode of specific species of grasshoppers), the swarming behaviour was a mobile one, essentially a fast-cycle nomadic activity. Swarming for each both provided defence against predation (any predator species were overwhelmed by the number of prey) and against competition: by moving rapidly across landscapes, passenger pigeons and locusts could out-compete other species for food sources (including humans).
If there's a benefit to human-based swarming, it doesn't appear to follow either of these modes. Humans don't swarm in mobs (outside of riots, and there, for similar advantage), but in stationary urbanisations. And the benefits seem to largely be of information flows and interactivity or interdependence.
At the same time, cities have multiple vulnerabilities. They aren't mobile, they require prodigious resources (Los Angeles, as an example, sources water from up to 1,500 miles away, and every city on the planet is dependent on oil which is found in only a few specific high-concentration regions and much of which crosses oceans to arrive), and of waste removal.
So, yes, humans become more effective competitors as they aggregate. Until, perhaps, they don't.
I’m banking on carbon capture being the obvious solution. Environmentalists (I do not count myself in their number) are resisting this because they’re worried it will lead to an attitude of complaisancy about human emissions. My point of view is that we already are grossly under shooting targets that bake in massive effects we haven’t begun to properly appreciate. Add in factors we can’t control like the feedback loop described in the parent and it literally isn’t going matter if we drop emissions to zero tomorrow. Therefore we need to start investing in remediation and carbon capture is the obvious best bet. I’m to the point where I’m literally building the case and background to chase this myself. Tech has been financially good to me and I plan to spend the rest of whatever time I have on the planet trying to make sure the same opportunities exist in the future for others.
There are carbon-capture devices already extant. Solar-powered. Self-replicating. They're called "plants".
Problem is that 1) you've got to sequester the carbon formed, 2) there's only so much ag productivity (measured in terms of carbon fixation) on the planet, and 3) it is largely spoken for -- humans claim 40% of net primary productivity, the rest of the planet fights over the remaining 60%.
I'd strongly recommend you start sorting out what the environmentalists (or at least ecologists) have been doing for the past century or so. Their models strike me as vastly more sound than those who claim other affiliations.
BAU is not sustainable. The question is which of the other-than-usual tracks we select. Or allow to be selected for us.
There is already non-ag ambient carbon capture happening at commercial scale. Also, if you limit yourself to what exists today, you can easily draw a straight line to “doomed”. I don’t mind if you choose to limit yourself, but I am going to try and create the future I want my children (and others) to have vs settling for status quo.
Well, I'll be dead before it gets too bad. But yes, the next few centuries will be challenging. China, Russia and Canada will do well, I suspect. Maybe even the Sahara. But not most of the US and Europe.
Destroying all civilization doesn't mean destroying all humans, but just the structures that hold society together. A runaway heating scenario may be a pretty effective way of doing that - all crops die, wars for food, nukes get used.
I think prottero worked on a method of synthesizing sugar at much lower cost via bacteria, so carbs may be possible too. Combine that with how really rich humanity is, so i think a technical solution would be availbe to solve those food issues, and what better incentive than a potential nuclear war, to convince people to collaborate on that ?
There's a pretty substantial gap between "poor people starving" and "people with nukes care," but it's still plausible enough to be chilling, that's for sure.
The people with nukes would be the last to starve.
Also for anyone to go nuclear there would have to be a strategic goal for that Russia nuking the US won’t really help their food shortage and vice versa.
With big brains and tools, humans can live in a much broader set of environmental conditions than any other species. While it doesn't make us extinction-proof, it makes us pretty hardy. It is hard to imagine what would destroy all the ecological niches that humans could survive in.
We have a few people who are intelligent, and yet as a whole we constantly try to kill our fellow man and let people go hungry. The only difference is we know our eventual end is coming and the preceding creatures likely did not.
I don't know if it's constructive, but I find it remarkable enough to note that I really don't know if you are correct or if the parent comment is correct.
>humans can live in a much broader set of environmental conditions than any other species.
Absolutely not. Most lifeforms simpler than us have an easier time surviving because it is easier for them to reproduce quickly. You're basically ignoring insects, crustaceans, algea, bacteria, most plants, and pretty much everything else.
Sure we're hardy and adaptable when you ignore most of life on earth. And then you want to bet on the only species that has almost purposefully engineered its own demise? Talk about bias...
What a tired argument. Of course we are special. We are capable of genetically modifying our food supplies and building shelter that allows us to live in any climate on the planet.
Top of the food chain generally is more vulnerable to changes causing extinction, not less.
E.g. if food for small rodents becomes much less available, the expected result is that small rodent species dwindle in population but survive, while some of large predators that need those small rodents may go extinct.
I don't get their test case. They took it to the lab, and thawed it up to room temperature? That's not going to happen. It's going to get warmer, maybe just warm enough for the bacteria to thaw, and then immediately die. Did they do any realistic tests?
At first, I agreed, but then realized there's two issues with the argument I can think of:
1) to get to the warmer temperatures, you need to pass through the room temperature stage first. Things might change quickly, but not THAT quickly, meaning whatever is lurking in the soil can cause havoc/mutate/etc. before hitting it's upper temperature limits.
2) The areas where permafrost is generally found see summer temperatures generally at or below 'room temperature' now.
I do agree, that their tests could have been more thorough and included future scenario temperatures, but may underestimate the problem by not allowing mutation time.
In the abstract what you wrote is fine, but my impression is that "enjoy what we have here and now" means "keep polluting" to most people. I think people can maintain or even improve their own happiness while decreasing their pollution. At least this could make humanity last longer.
I'm a transportation cyclist. I mostly ride to save money and improve my physical fitness. The environmental benefits seem to depend on one's diet (mine is about half vegetarian), but seem pretty clear. When talking with some drivers they seem to have the implicit belief that transportation cycling is a "sacrifice" I make for the environment, as if I believe that driving is obviously better. They seem pretty surprised when I tell them that I'd still ride even without the environmental benefits because I enjoy being fit and can put the money to better use. It's not a sacrifice, it's a preference. One I think many folks would agree with if they gave cycling a chance. I think there are quite a few things that people would consider to be massive sacrifices but actually end up being fine.
I always thought about cycling to work, but that would mean more than doubling the amount of time commuting and thus complicating the family organization (basically my wife, who is also having a full-time job, would need to take care of everything, while I am polluting less).
So far I haven't found a definite solution to how, in the modern world, work at least 8-10 hours per day, possibly far from home, while having a family, and not polluting.
Try cycling once and see how you like it. It's a small investment, and you really don't know how it will go until you try it. It's not uncommon either to commute by bike one day a week if you like it but can't do it every day. I think most people are far too pessimistic about how possible cycling is.
Though I do agree that cycling is practically impossible for many people, consider this: Just like most people consider their driving commute when choosing where to live, a cyclist needs to consider their cycling commute when choosing where to live. If you optimize for driving, don't expect cycling to be easy. The same applies for jobs: many people won't take a job if they expect the traffic to be a pain. I won't take any jobs that make cycling impossible or even hard. Exact same logic.
Completely agree. It’s all natural cycles, transformations ... but accepting this is not really easy as long as one fears death. There is so much eternal beauty that we are part of and that we could focus on instead of wars and Desasters.
Personally, I think dying by something as unique as climate change would be a spectacular way to go.
Think of all the other mundane ways people die everyday: disease, a bullet, or even just tripping off a sidewalk wrong and hitting your head on the curb. Is that really any better of a fate?
As long as I have a guarantee we can preserve our culture, I can care less about my future. Even if we lose our species, we should leave something behind that indicates we mattered.
If our species doesn't survive, then we likely didn't matter to anyone. The human race will have only existed for nothing more than a blink of the universe's eye.
Maybe the neglected catastrophists of the 1940s are about to see their day. At any rate, the following article cites -many- sources as regards the 'Alaskan muck'.
https://steemit.com/velikovsky/@harlotscurse/in-alaska
It seems the only way to combat the thawing permafrost problem is to deploy world-scale carbon capturing schemes of some sort. Here's to hoping that we can develop something like that in time.
> the only way to combat the thawing permafrost problem is to deploy world-scale carbon capturing schemes of some sort
I think this is a big misunderstanding. The world-scale carbon capturing schemes were deployed already. The problem isn't the capture, the problem is how to prevent them to leak the stored carbon back to the atmosphere.
It seems like global climate has low-CO2/low-temperature and high-CO2/high-temperature clusters of attractors. And that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have pushed global climate toward high-CO2/high-temperature. But at least, it seems that there's enough of a barrier from the Venus extreme.
I thought this was about methane clathrates. Hasn't there been carbon leaking from permafrost into the atmosphere already? To what degree does the production in the arctic affect that?
Yes, but there's a point where the rate hits a critical level that dumps it in a runaway feedback loop. Have we hit that rate already? We don't know enough to say, but it's fairly likely that we'll hit it within the 21st century.
I loved that one! He can take the form of other people but is hive-like or something so if you heat his blood the host goes nuts? Something like that anyway. Kurt Russel. The claymation was excellent: cult classic.
That's mostly from John Carpenter's The Thing, the blood reacted to heat as our protagonist's test for detecting infected hosts, not causing the host that was tied up to react, that was just the thing transmogrifying. There's also a Pournelle novel where a research team lands on a green, human inhabitable planet and a native species looks something like a monitor lizard but can engage a hyper mode that speeds up it's metabolism so it generates a lot of heat, this is to enable it to run like a cheetah with the strength of a gorilla or something like that IIRC.
Despite the cliche title...frozen up to 1,000 feet down. That caught my eye. Plenty can be hidden in a vault that deep. Perhaps the next ebola? Or worse?
Add this to the list: Climate Change and the Things We're Unprepared For.
This is not a “time bomb”, which implies something being inflicted on us by a malevolent agent. It’s a temperature bomb. And we can easily prevent the explosion by simply not making the planet too hot.
In all probability, that ship sailed ten years ago. "So doing bad stuff" is no longer a viable strategy by itself. Sure we should do that, but at this point, without adaptation and mitigation strategies, we're fucked.
> In fact, there's more carbon in the permafrost, Douglas says, than all the carbon humans have spewed into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — first with steam trains, then with coal plants, cars and planes.
> Scientists don't know yet how much carbon will get released from thawing permafrost or how fast it will happen.
In a nutshell why not accepting anthropogenic global warming is scientific and accepting it is anti-science, not the other way around.
It's also true that there's no DEFINITIVE ABSOLUTE PROOF that pressing the nuclear launch button will clause a MAD-style nuclear escalation.
But still, there's good reason to believe it would, so it'd be irresponsible to push the button given other reasonable alternatives.
"You can't ever know FOR SURE that this destroy life as we know it!" has to be the least logical form and most confusing of climate change skepticism out there. The fact that anyone would consider this argument, on its own, even remotely compelling, is... oy.
That has nothing to do with what I quoted from the article. It would benefit you to suppress your religious fervor for a few minutes and examine the facts for yourself.
> That has nothing to do with what I quoted from the article.
This has everything to do with your characterization of those quotes. "We don't know for certain, but shit could get bad" is a perfectly reasonable basis for precaution. The precautionary principle is not "anti-scientific".
> It would benefit you to suppress your religious fervor for a few minutes and examine the facts for yourself.
What are you trying to accomplish with this sentence?
This has to do with how bad and how quick the feedback loops created by anthropogenic global warming will be and has nothing do with whether it exists or not.
Think about what you wrote. If I am giving you one apple per hour and you are giving me 100 apples per hour, is it accurate to say you are feeding apples back to me?
No, I am feeding apples back to you. I am the feedback loop. You are the source.
> If I am giving you one apple per hour and you are giving me 100 apples per hour, is it accurate to say you are feeding apples back to me?
Yes. I am feeding apples to you. You are feeding apples to me. that's why a feedback loop is called a loop.
> No, I am feeding apples back to you. I am the feedback loop. You are the source.
You are not a loop. You are a person.
I realize that sounds silly, but I think this actually is the miscomprehension at play. We are both sources. And sinks. That's literally the whole point of a feedback loop.
Because I'm writing this on a site with a combinator in the upper left-hand corner, consider the following programming/logic analogy:
let A = λx.xx
Does the program diverge? NO. However, the program
let A = λx.xx;
AA
does diverge. This is analogous to llamataboot's point: if anthropogenic warming triggers a feedback loop, then the effects of that feedback loop are attributable to anthropogenic warming.
A is a function definition, not a diverging program. You are a person, not a loop.
The observation by llamataboot that "maybe we shouldn't execute AA given what we know about the definition of A" demonstrates a competent and accurate understanding of feedback loops.
[0]https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/4884009...