To see both the longer trend (graph), a comparison with the value at the same time the previous year, and the current value for CO2, CH4, N2O, and SF6 I occasionally check the Global Monitoring Laboratory (NOAA):
Link to methane, click on one of the four switched at the top for the others.
Warning: It always is pretty depressing to visit this site.
You can also check out a tab "Growth Rate", for CO2 for example it's https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html -- which is even more depressing. Even the rate(!) increases!
.
So, I'm mid-life, and I do what many might say is actually interesting and useful software work, no standard stuff, lots of new things to design and plan and implement in a small software company I co-founded in a team that works well together. Currently we do most of our work for the health sector. Still, I can't take it too seriously. I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture. I'm not demotivated or depressed, it's more the opposite, I can't feel excited about any achievements because I think that most of what we do, what people do these days, is just keeping busy to avoid facing the bigger reality. The show must go on. I've developed the feeling that what we have, even in the rich countries, is much more fragile than people realize.
Unless there is a full stop of digging up any more carbon from below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and I mean full stop and not just a reduction, the amount of carbon in the above ground carbon cycle is going to keep increasing. No amount of trees planted or most of he other measures proposed will change that. How likely is that to happen?
Your post struck a chord in me. I work with civil engineering (water management) which sounds like it could impact climate change. Nope. I work on how to make our processes more efficient so we can build more infrastructure faster. Infrastructure that has to be maintained CO2 emission free in the future - we are building more of it.
And I am truly bewildered. When I look at all the graphs the only thing I see is that we have to stop everything now. But what I see at work is that we just keep digging with an even faster pace.
This summer I tried to read some old Greek tragedies. The characters have to make difficult choices and it all ends with tragedy despite everyone’s best intensions and efforts. I was saddened by the resemblance on how humanity is tackling climate change. I am afraid we are writing an old Greek tragedy.
I volunteer on the first one and am a member on the other two, and there is a relatively good (and growing!) possibility of finding a good match between what you feel and what you end up working on.
There you can find incubators and funds to launch your climate startup or job postings to work on the coolest climate tech companies (and the not so cool ones too!)
I found this interview with former chief scientific advisor for climate change to the UK Government and Oxford professor Sir David King both timely and relevant to your point. He now works at the Centre of Climate Repair at Cambridge.
If anyone is interested in an antecedent to our current climate change situation, BBC's In Our Time did an excellent deep-dive into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum:
The kind of carbon ejection and correlated temperature change we're seeing today hasn't really been seen since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. That atmospheric event happened over the course of 50_000 years, we're looking to replicate it in a matter of 100s of years.
What are you talking about? Where did I make an end of the world prediction? It is you who brought that up. Of course nothing is going to end. Nice strawman. You even try to bring COVID into the discussion? What are you doing, and why?
Judging by the sentiment displayed in your post, you are affected by various doom and gloom climatic end of world predictions. And you do allude to it right here:
> I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture.
If anything, you're the one creating a strawman out of GP's attempt to get you out of the slump.
The media agenda is the same media agenda that there has always been and that's to make money. Whoever told you there's a media agenda is the one with the agenda that they aren't telling you about.
Remember when the media pointed their cameras away from Hillary as she feinted at the 911 memorial ceremony? If not for one man with a cell phone, this copy-selling story be unknown.
Do you think Jeff Zucker ran CNN so as to maximize profit?
Yes Zucker absolutely ran it to maximize profit. CNN broadcast Trump rallies 24/7 in 2016 because it was good for ratings. CNN was a major factor in Trumps nomination and election to president. You just cherry pick events that suit your narrative. All of these companies are businesses and they're in it for the profits. They may put on a liberal or conservative face, but it's just to exploit a niche in the market. They're corporations with shareholders at the end of the day. Which is a strong constraint on what ideas they'll explore and what issues they'll cover.
Then explain why mainstream media spread missinformation about vaccines (immunity) or origin of virus (bat theory) and not cover any other sensations like dying athletes live (it was just fine to spread fear about collapsing people on street in China), massive protests against mandates all around world (politicans call them terrorists, small minority and then declare state of emergency) or alarming increase of myocarditis of young healthy people after vaccination (media trying to point out that this is because of covid or global warming).
Looks like obvious agenda. People slowly realise it and will stand against it. Enough is enough.
> What are you talking about? Where did I make an end of the world prediction? It is you who brought that up. Of course nothing is going to end. Nice strawman.
What do you think I refer to by "end of the world"? Don't you think I refer to this part of your comment?
> I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture.
Don't you think that I refer to the numerous comments seen on HN whenever this topic comes up, from people saying that they're expecting massive global upheaval in a few years, that they're not having children because they think society will collapse?
> You even try to bring COVID into the discussion?
Do you not see a parallel between the way the media has stirred panic about global warming^W^Wclimate change^Wcrisis for decades, and the way the media has stirred panic about COVID for the last two years?
That XKCD concatenated data from different studies with different temporal resolution, so it's very misleading. Past data came from Marcott et. al, who said:
“the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of about 120 years on average.”
“no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1,000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2,000-year periods and longer.”
Recent data came from yearly measurements, so preserves variability on a yearly basis.
In other words, the way past data was determined, sudden changes would be hidden, like the temperature spike that it shows in the 20th century.
You also have to wonder why the chart stopped 20000 years in the past:
""Before humans burned the first coal to fire the first steam engine, the planet was warmer than this and had much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.Both went back down."
Yes. That's true and it doesn't in any way mean that it is at all safe for humans to jack up co2 levels in such a short period of time. All of the available evidence from the people who discovered those things in the first place suggests that this is a massive gamble we are taking with bad odds and everything we hold dear is at stake.
""People twice your age lived through the end-of-the-world predictions of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But here we are, more technologically advanced than ever (for better or worse). But this time it's different! We have science!""
That's exactly right. Climate scientists aren't some kooks looking for clues to Armageddon in the bible or hearing voices. Global warming is happening. It's measurable. We know exactly whats causing it and we have very good reason to believe its dangerous to society and ecosystems. This has fuck all to do with doomsday cults. Don't look up is a perfect metaphor. If 97% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor is on a collision course for the earth you wouldn't complain that you heard similar things from Jim Jones and you don't want to waste your tax dollars to divert some imaginary asteroid. For some reason with climate its socially acceptable to hold such an idiotic view.
""Science is a process carried out by people; people like John Cook, Michael Mann, etc, well-known frauds who were nonetheless widely touted by top journalists at outlets like the NYT and top politicians like Barack Obama.""
The findings of both Mann and Cook have been independently verified and expanded upon by a variety of scientific studies following separate lines of inquiry. As in following different lines of evidence using different methodologies. You are a partisan and the partisan media outlets have maligned these guys, but their work stands up. I'm sure theres a conspiracy you can conjure to explain this though.
""We see a constant stream of articles here on HN, highly upvoted, even, decrying the corruption in the peer review process, the research grant process, and confirmed by commenters telling tales of their time in the PhD research world.""
There are a number of different problems in academia and the peer review process. None of them have cast doubt on the consensus findings of the field of climatology. Actually one of the problems is predatory journals who accept anything for a fee and that's more really only a problem for climate contrarian scientists since that's the only kind of journal where they can pass "peer review" most of the time.
""These scientists were brought up in the same institutions that brought us COVID lockdowns, don't-mask--now-mask--nevermind-don't-mask, redefined vaccines-that-aren't-what-vaccines-used-to-be-defined-as, etc. And the media touts them just the same.""
Jesus next thing you're going to tell me to trust Q
""We see that this whole planet of humans has been kept in a state of panic for two years about COVID, because there exist entities who want to increase their power, and the way to transfer power is to convince people that it's necessary for their own good.""
They aren't transferring power. They're expending it. None of the covid measures has made it easier for one party to win an election or harder for the other. Biden hasn't been granted emergency authority to be president for life. No they've implemented measures to try to keep people safe and the backlash from it seems to make it less likely they stay in power. Not more. The whole narrative here is just self serving political hackery.
""But, no, of course, there couldn't be any similarity between these two issues behind the scenes. After all, it's scientific consensus! Which has always been a reliable indicator of objective truth, and is one of the cornerstones of the scientific process!""
There is a similarity, but it isn't behind the scenes. It's right here in these comments. Your narrative. That's what's similar. Conservatives need an enemy to rally the troops and that enemy is mostly democrats and anything they advocate for. Especially if opposing that thing happens to be in the best interests of coporate backers of the republican party. Just claim it's all a conspiracy to give the government power and the rank and file will eat it up. Good governance be damned. Future be damned.
""What's that idea, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.""
No it's fool me once shame on you, fool me, we won't get fooled again
""If I weren't such a staunch advocate of free speech, I'd say that it ought to be criminal, how people have been convinced to live a life of fear, to think that there's no point to having a family, working toward the future, etc. How much suffering has been caused by these lies. It's simply evil.""
What's evil is downplaying actual dangers as lies and subjecting society to things like global warming and deadly diseases because you've come to associate these things with liberals. All the while banning books and passing anti 1st amendment, anti education laws under the guise of banning CRT in schools.
""Somewhere there must be a book that catalogues the dire, end-of-the-world predictions made by humans throughout the millennia. I'd implore you to find it, read it, be at ease, and live your life to the fullest while you have the health and means to do so. ""
Climate science is science. It is not tainted by the false predictions of con men and cult leaders. That doesn't work that way.
""John Cook, et al and the "97% consensus" paper was revealed to be a farce, its conclusion planned in advance on his Web forum, and the methodology cooked to provide the desired result. This is--or should be--common knowledge by now. The farce of Mann's "hockey stick" has been very widely reported, as well as the FOIA-leaked emails proving it, so you have no excuse to be ignorant of it, either.""
This is patently false. CookVerheggen 2014 - 91% consensus; Farnsworth and Lichter, 2011 - 84% consensus; Anderegg et al, 2010 - 97% consensus; Doran, 2009 - 97% consensus; Bray and von Storch, 2008 - 93.8% consensus; STATS, 2007 - 95% consensus; Oreskes, 2004 - 100% consensus, Lynas et al, 2021 - >99%.
Not only was cook right that there is a consensus, but there is even now a consensus on the consensus and the consensus has grown from 97% to >99%. Cook hasn't been discredited. He's been confirmed over and over by independent groups using completely different methodologies.
This is exactly the same case with Mann. Not only has the hockey stick been confirmed independently countless times other groups have extended the paleo climate reconstruction back over 100,000 years and still come to the same conclusion that current anthropogenic warming is unprecedented. Manns emails were hacked and snippits were taken out of context to paint a misleading picture of his methodologies.
One of his biggest critics physicist Richard Muller (https://youtu.be/8BQpciw8suk here he is criticizing mann) founded an institution called Berkley Earth specifically to investigate Manns findings. He got independent funding and hired the some of the greatest experts in relevant fields including one who received a Nobel while working there. They used the most rigorous statistical methods and were the first group to synthesize every available data set. They found that not only was Mann correct, but that they previous studies had actually underestimated the warming.
""The predictions about future global average temperature anomaly does not involve reproducible experiments, and the models have, thus far, all proven incorrect.""
This is false. The planet is about 1.1C above preindustrial temps. These temps are unprecedented in over 100,000 years. Many studies have predicted that the earth would be this warm at this time with this level of co2. Models are run with multiple emissions scenarios. The way denialsts come to the conclusion you have is to pick a scenario with higher co2 levels than we actually got and claim it overestimated warming. When you pick a scenario that actually reflects the co2 levels we have the predictions are all pretty much in line with what actually has happened.
""As Cook and Mann have shown, it is, and it does""
This opinion has been bought and paid for by fossil fuel companies who paid PR companies to smear these guys. The science stands up very well, but you've bought in and it doesn't matter if 10 or 10,000 studies confirm their findings you will dismiss it as a conspiracy.
""we're using climate change now""
Global warming and climate change are both terms which are in regular usage by climatologists. Global warming is what our greenhouse gas emissions causing. Climate change is a term used to describe the knock on effects of global warming like disruption to the jet stream, increased atmospheric water vapor, droughts, etc. The only time anyone tried to change out the terms global warming for climate change was when PR expert and republican political strategist Frank Luntz used focus groups to discover people showed less concern if climate change was used instead of global warming. After that republicans began insisting that climate change was the correct terminology and this idea spread somewhat in the media and even unwitting democrats. Scientists never insisted we use the term climate change over global warming. It's ironic that a right wing PR campaign is now put forward as evidence of some kind of moving of the goal posts.
> This opinion has been bought and paid for by fossil fuel companies who paid PR companies to smear these guys. The science stands up very well, but you've bought in and it doesn't matter if 10 or 10,000 studies confirm their findings you will dismiss it as a conspiracy.
If dang were made aware of that comment of yours, I wonder if he would sanction you for it. Readers (as if there are any) will note that I've made no such ad hominem comments about you, but have only commented on the facts and the logic of the issue.
Now, since I claimed that Cook, et al was a farce, you've said:
> Not only was cook right that there is a consensus, but there is even now a consensus on the consensus and the consensus has grown from 97% to >99%. Cook hasn't been discredited. He's been confirmed over and over by independent groups using completely different methodologies.
Again, this claim of yours is false. In fact, the claims of Cook, et al have been repeatedly proven to be misleading, false, and intentionally so:[0]
Two-thirds of the papers that Cook and his colleagues examined expressed no view at all on the consensus. Of the remaining 34%, the authors claimed that 33% endorsed the consensus. Divide 33 by 34 and you get 97%. But this result is essentially meaningless, because they set the bar so low.
The survey authors didn’t ask if climate change was dangerous or “manmade”. They only asked if a given paper accepted that humans have some effect on the climate, which as already noted is uncontroversial. It could mean as little as accepting the “urban heat island” effect.
So a far better question would be: How many of the studies claimed that humans have caused most of the observed global warming? And oddly, we do know. Because buried in the authors’ data was the answer: A mere 64 out of nearly 12,000 papers! That’s not 97%, it’s one half of one percent. It’s one in 200.
And it gets worse. In a follow-up study[1], climatologist David Legates read those 64 papers and found that a third of them didn’t even say what Cook and his team claimed. Only 41 actually endorsed the view that global warming is mostly manmade. And we still haven’t got to it being “dangerous”. That part of the survey results was simply invented, by politicians and activists.
Other researchers have condemned the Cook study on other grounds too. For instance economist Richard Tol showed[2] that over three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsing even the weak consensus actually said nothing at all on the subject. And evidence later emerged[3] that the authors of the paper were drafting press releases about their findings before they even started doing the research, which indicates an alarming level not of warming or of consensus but of bias.
Now, rather than assail you with accusations of conspiracy and partisanship, as you have repeatedly done to me, I'll leave speculation about your motives to the reader (as if there are any left here). But we can all see which kind of comment gets upvoted here, and which kind gets downvoted to death. "Science," indeed.
> Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.
But doesn't the article suggest that the recent rapid rise comes from methane produced by microbes? If this is true, it is not the melting permafrost, but (intensive) agriculture that is the culprit.
> But since 2007, when methane levels began to rise more rapidly again, the proportion of methane containing 13C began to fall (see ‘The rise and fall of methane’). Some researchers believe that this suggests that much of the increase in the past 15 years might be due to bacterial sources, rather than the extraction of fossil fuels.
Isn't the methane in permafrost produced by microbes? It's basically wet lands that ended up being frozen, and as they thaw they go back to releasing the methane being processed by the breakdown of organic matter from microbes.
So then what happens, the microbes eat stuff, more soil is produced, more trees and animals grow, more rain comes, more stuff gets buried, and the cycle repeats itself?
Honest question, not refuting anything here just a lot of the articles stop at the melting part, what happens after that?
It's more like microbes eat stuff -> greenhouse gases released -> climate warms -> more permafrost melts -> microbes eat more stuff -> feedback loop which eventually melts all the permafrost and triples the atmospheric carbon -> cataclysmic and permanent disruption of global weather patterns. It's not a cycle, it's a one-way phase transition.
The problem is that which microbes do the job depends on how much oxygen is available. If there's not enough, like when buried, the decomposition is anerobic. This produces a lot more methane than aerobic decomposition.
Climate Scientist, Ilissa Ocko[1], talked about Methane and Climate Change last month at a TED Talk. The video is worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlWuP7wESZw
BTW she works for the Environmental Defense Fund who will soon be launching a satellite to measure methane (funded by a $100MM grant from Bezos). Despite giving a TED talk she's a serious scientist.
Genuinely curious - while Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, isn’t its half life in the atmosphere only 9 years? Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years?
So as long as it’s methane it’s hundreds of times worse than CO2, then it becomes the same as co2[0]. Never better.
Which is why despite a short half life it has a global warming potential of ~25 over 100 years (Co2 is 1).
Then you also have the issue that even if it’s short (relatively, it takes multiples of the half-life to really taper off) for that duration your GW effect really shoots up, which tends not to be a good thing, 120 years is already quite short for biological systems to adapt, 10 is basically infeasible.
[0] actually a bit worse still as 1t ch4 yields 2.7t co2 and gwp is mass-relative
Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but it comes back down as rain quite quickly. It's also more or less in (dynamical) equilibrium, because there is always a huge source of atmospheric water in the form of evaporation from the oceans' surface. The way to meaningfully increase atmospheric water content is to increase atmospheric temperature, which methane contributes to, but that's a second order effect.
I think you're spot on in your observation. Reducing methane would help and definitely has its place, but CO₂ is a totally different beast. CO₂ is best thought of as a "stock pollutant" meaning that the more you have of it, the worse the effects. This follows directly from that fact that CO₂ sticks around in the atmosphere for millennia, increasing atmospheric radiative forcing. Methane, on the other hand, is better framed as a "flow pollutant" - it's harm is ~proportional to the rate of emission. This is a direct consequence of its much shorter atmospheric lifetime.
And if you're up for a pretty technical (but still fairly approachable) read, check out R.T. Pierrehumbert ''Short-Lived Climate Pollution.'' Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 2014 42:1, 341-379 [https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-060313-054843]. Near the end of the paper, he delivers this gem: "Methane mitigation is like trying to stockpile bananas to eat during retirement. Given the short lifetime of bananas, it makes little sense to begin saving them until your retirement date is quite near."
The cheap option of going out of our way to do less (so we emit less) is very probably off the table at this point.
As a species we need another plan. I like a mixed approach of sequestering atmospheric gasses via processes that synthesize useful compounds from the components we don't want in the air as well as hard scifi concepts like giant reflective surfaces in space. Throttling the quantity of sunlight by reflecting a portion away from the earth sounds super expensive... but that might be the only viable option left.
Honestly, at this point, we need to be doing BOTH and to such a degree that it feels painful. We need to cut our global energy use massively to slow the runaway acceleration, and we need carbon capture solutions, ridiculous sci-fi mirror solutions, pretty much all of it, to get it back under control. And even then, we're going to have quite a few years of fucked-up weather worse than this.
The problem is, I despair of us doing EITHER, and "quite a few years of fucked-up weather" is going to sound like a fantasy story.
Creating “useful” compounds from atmospheric green house gasses isn’t some “have your cake and eat it, too” type thing. It is going to be extremely inefficient and expensive. Emitting less is still cheaper.
Or we could go with the cheap option. If there’s anything that the global pandemic taught us, it is that nothing about human behavior is ever set in stone and there will always be a way to make even draconian policies like lockdowns and mandatory face masks politically viable. The billions we’d spend building the crazy ideas you suggested which also have no guarantee of success, could be channeled into whatever it takes to get people to care more about the planet.
I believe it also showed us the limit of individual action on climate change. It's doubtful I could have gotten 100% work from home out of my employers sans pandemic. My partner stopped going to work because her industry was on government provided life support.
Despite that CO2 emissions in 2020 dropped by 6%. A change which would be wiped out in a few years by the natural growth.
Getting individuals to do anything meaningful about climate change is like those people telling millennials to stop buying Starbucks and cancel Netflix in order to buy a home.
There is that terrible idea that you know what should be best for others. Just forget it, it is not how society works. Totalitarian states trying that idea use over and over and fail with terrible costs.
Lockdowns were heavily resisted even with millions dying right now. It will be hard to lock people down in what they can do, politically, because of something that will kill people in the future. People that might not be “me” from the point of view of each individual.
I’ve burnt 12 cars after lockdowns to ensure that you don’t get the idea that climate lockdowns would be a nice solution after Covid lockdowns. My CO2 emissions now far outweigh (perhaps 10x) the base level, not to talk about the poor grandmas who can’t afford a new car.
Lockdowns are absolutely horrible. I don’t get why you don’t kill us directly, and pretend to do it for our health. Suicide, harm, family violence, just having a life with no leisure, no secret why solitary confinement is used as a means of torture in US prisons.
You just don’t have the stats yet, but the harm you have caused by choosing lockdowns is incommensurable. PLEASE build stats on well-being and how many hours-in-good-health were actually saved by lockdowns, and wait a few years for those studies to surface before concluding that lockdowns are a fine way to deal with a problem. Taking harm upon others may satisfy your feeling of dealing a problem, but the base problem, Covid, has not even been squashed, it spread in waves and became widespread and endemic anyway like doctors always said it would. Not - solved, but saddistic measures were taken against the weaker of us.
With global warming, I have no doubt you’ll crush our lives again without solving anything about global warming itself.
First is that we are on track to overshoot the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C. It's now more a question of how much we are going to blow past 1.5C. Every bit counts now and a pulse of very potent greenhouse gasses at this time is very unhelpful.
2. There could be tipping points that aren't predictable. Methane may temporarily add a small increase to the global average temps, but could end up being the difference for whether permafrost melt begins releasing large amounts of co2 and even more methane that take us up to some even higher temperatire equilibrium.
Global warming is a massive unplanned, uncontrolled experiment with the thermal and chemical properties of the only biosphere we know of. The sooner we stop that experiment the safer humanity will be overall.
Alternatively, attempting to curtail human emissions to some arbitrary level will, unquestionably, have drastic impact on human quality of life worldwide and the impact will be particularly acute on the developing world and those in poverty in the developed world.
Large, influential emitters like China and India will not play ball. As such, the climate experiment will inevitably continue unabated, despite any of the self-damaging choices made by the developed world.
Additionally, our ability to actually combat the acute impacts of climate change (i.e. construction of flood barriers, land reclamation, movement of people out of flood-prone areas) could easily be actively hampered by overzealous limits on human development associated with attempt to reduce emissions. In other words, this is a nuanced issue and we have little choice but to press onwards.
That is a lame excuse, mostly used by people from developed countries that are responsible for the issue, so you dodge responsibility and also try to put blame on the developing country why you are continuing screwing the environment. It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing his children too (I am thinking especially at coal plants and cars that have effects locally too, so cleaning yup your house means you will have healthier population and less CO2)
> It is like you have a history of you and your ancestors abusing your children and you don't want to stop because the new neighbor is also abusing his children too
This is a poor metaphor. It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle, explaining to your neighbor why it's bad, and then your neighbor saying "well, your grandpa beat the shit out of your dad, so we get to beat our kids too!"
And of course, the largest producer of CO2 isn't the US as you imply, it's China.
The US is the largest historical emitter of co2. Meaning that the US is still responsible for the largest share of excess co2 in the atmosphere. If co2 emissions are a race then the US has slowed and China is now running faster, but the US lapped china 3 times before China started gaining on them.
Additionally the idea that deploying new technologies equates to economic self harm is absurd. The price per kilowatt hour of renewable energy has been dropping continuously for decades in a pattern similar to moores law. Soon renewable energy will be so much cheaper than fossil fuels that it will be similar to what the discovery of crude oil deposits did to the whale oil industry. Betting on fossil fuels from an economic perspective is stupid as hell in 2022 and risking the survival of worldwide ecosystems and society on that bet is literally the stupidest thing I can think of people advocating for.
China is a problem. We absolutely need China to reduce their emissions much more aggressively than they are. Instead of using them as an excuse to sleepwalk humanity towards potential catastrophe we should be reducing our own emissions so as to have a legitimate position from which to argue about what China should be doing while using our significant economic leverage to incentivize China to reduce their emissions.
I thought it was pretty well understood by now that given that manufacturing of goods destined for the US is happening in China or SE Asia, that there's effectively a miscount.
It's not like china is sitting there burning coal for no reason. And all those ships are going to ports in the US and the like.
Of course this is all a shared responsibility, but let's not act like all of those "CO2 emissions by country" calculations are not extremely fudged by how consumption, manufacturing, and recycling happen in various parts of the world.
This is a poor metaphor. A lot of the CO2 is for producing stuff for the western world. So your neighbor is saying: If I don't beat my kids, they won't come over to you and do slave work, and you'll have to beat your own kids again.
Or we can just agree that this metaphor doesn't work.
>And of course, the largest producer of CO2 isn't the US as you imply, it's China
Only if you ignore per capita and history.
A better analogy, Someone was selling meat, 50% horse and 5-% rabbit , he was using q horse at 1 rabbit ratio, this are your stats , bullshit.
>It's more akin to having a family history of child abuse, trying to stop the cycle
Except you are trying not to stop the cyucle and finding s shitty excuse, I will continue poisoning this city with coal related toxic waste because China has even worse pollution. I should continue throwing plastic garbage in the river and kill our river life because the neighboring country/cities does the same.
My phrasing likely could have been more clear. China and India cannot curtail emissions without reducing energy availability and increasing costs to their population. This has direct and immediate impact on quality of life and human development within their borders. It is actually rather hypocritical for the developed world, which has benefitted from years of development on the back of low cost energy, to push for emissions reductions from countries that have decades of development to undergo.
To be clear, there are intermediate actions they could and should take, such as phase out of coal in favor of natural gas.
Watching climate change deniers periodically change up their bullshit because the old bullshit got too obviously wrong has been equal parts hilarious and frustrating.
I guess now we're at the "okay okay fine, it's a problem, and humans are causing it. But we should still do nothing to fix it, because... China?"
Screaming right past the acceptance stage and in for another loop of denial.
It is interesting that you term me as a climate denier, when in no part did my comment imply I deny the effects and future impact of climate change. I made a point about how global policymaking can and will realistically react to the situation.
Because accepting the potential demise of modern complex society and the collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity world wide and a mass exctinction event because "Fuck it China and India are bad so lets just party until the end." Is fucking stupid.
The proper framing is we need to reduce emissions and so does China and India so how do we facilitate that. The answer is to
1.) Reduce our own emissions to have the moral basis to push other countries to reduce their emissions.
2.) Tax imported goods based on the emissions created in their production. Incentivizing foreign countries to reduce their emissions to be competitive in US markets.
3.) Lobby other countries to do the same using the diplomatic means we have at our disposal.
That's complete bullshit. Global warming isnt a binary of either we're fucked or we're not fucked. It's a gradient of more fucked the look get we wait to phase out emissions. It's never too late because it can always be
Made worse by continuing to emit more.
It's funny how reactionaries have gone from "it's not really happening", "it's not man made" to "it's too late anyways" in no time. The same goal remains; to keep doing nothing.
Moving to higher ground only considers the first-order effects of climate change - floods and severe weather. Potential further effects include reduced agricultural output/efficiency, massive migrations of climate refugees, and the destabilization or collapse of national governments. If we do nothing, natural disasters will be the least of our concerns.
It depends how it goes to zero. US is a significant importer from China. If they go to zero through enforcement of produce-or-import-at-zero laws, it would also push China to improve or lose lots of business.
> US emissions are actually lower than in the past.
> But the US could go to zero and if China and India don't lower emission it won't matter.
Because if the US cut its emissions by half, the standard of living of US citizens (and its associated carbon cost) will become about the same as in China, and will still be a whopping 3.5 times better than India.
Looking at total emissions is actually meaningless, as reducing emissions (significantly) necessarily involves lowering the standard of living - less meat, less transportation, more expensive electricity, less stuff, less construction, less heating etc. The US and EU have a lot of place for reducing our CO2 by reducing our standards of living than India (which produces less CO2 per person than Sweden or any other country in the EU).
Sure, there is some amount of CO2 reduction that can be achieved by green power, but nowhere near enough at the scale and speed needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
We don't need to reduce our standard of living. We need to change our energy sources to renewables and nuclear. Incentivizing density over sprawl would be good too. As well as efficiency. The only people arguing we need to drastically reduce energy usage are people arguing against doing anything. It's a strawman.
We will have to. I know it can seem like an argument against doing anything, but that is not where I'm coming from. I'm also not arguing in favor of self flagellation or individual action in the face of huge social forces.
But, given how grave and urgent the situation is getting, there is no way to convert all curent energy generation to green energy AND increase energy generation capacity to keep up with normal economic growth AND increase it many times over to electrify all transportation AND electrify all heating. And even if we were to succeed in all that, that only covers about half of US emissions at best - the other half is coming from agriculture, industry and residential emissions. Not to mention the massive emissions that are happening in China but ultimately serving the US market.
It's simply not possible to achieve the necessary time frames (net 0 in 20 years) without significantly reducing economic activity and standards of living in the short term - then growing back to current activity and standards of living in the longer term.
China and India are nothing compared to the US, if you look at the relevant metrics - emissions per capita. The US is emitting the same as China or near enough not to matter, but doing so at less than a third of the population. The comparison with India is even more one-sided.
Not to mention, much of China's emissions are actually coming from its factories supplying the US and Europe with goods. If we just give up on buying some of the goods, emissions will go down.
Finally, to call any measures on combatting climate change that were enacted anywhere in the world "overzealous" is laughable. The only measure stat can actually put a dent in the ever increasing temperatures are those that will come with economic contraction - not just stopping the growth, but actually downsize our economies for a decade or two - but this is completely unthinkable to liberals.
The best measures that are being taken today would have helped if they had been taken in the 1960s when the problem was first understood. Instead, we sacrificed the future for economic growth in the present, and are now doing minor improvements (wind and solar, electric cars) that will barely even reduce the rhythm at which emissions are increasing.
Emissions per capita is only relevant if you want to assign moral blame rather than solve the problem. Canada and Australia are higher per capita than the US [0], and you can demonize and crucify them all you want, but it doesn't stop more than 3% of the total problem.
Similarly, you can send every person in the US back to the stone age, and you're still going to have about 80% of the problem unless you can get other countries to join along.
Edit: If every country on Earth had India's emissions per capita, we would be cutting global emissions to less than 25% of what they are today.
Emissions per capita are relevant if you want to discuss a realistic expectation of how low a country's emissions can go. They are also directly relevant: every citizen of a country must be fed, must be given electricity, must use transportation, and must consume goods - each of these cost CO2 in quite direct proportion to the number of citizens.
For example, China has a lot of room for improvement, but India does not, as it's already at lower emissions per capita than half the world (much lower than any EU country, for example).
Global warming is not exclusively the problem of the global south. Poor people in China or India have the same rights to affordable electricity as people in Norway or Germany, which have higher emissions than China per person, despite the fact that they have outsourced plenty of emissions to China.
Overall, if say we needed to reduce emissions by 50%, countries with higher emissions per capita will likely have to reduce MORE than that, as China and particularly India would incur much more harm to their hundreds of millions of citizens than Germany or the USA if they were to significantly reduce emissions.
> Emissions per capita are relevant if [...] each of these cost CO2 in quite direct proportion to the number of citizens.
Forgive the aggressive editing of your quote, but multiplying emissions per capita times the number of citizens is exactly emissions per country.
> want to discuss a realistic expectation of how low a country's emissions can go
Theoretically, most countries emissions could go to zero with nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and/or geothermal. You can dive into the touchy feely stuff about people's quality of life, but it's easy to imagine a high quality of life in a country that went pure nuclear (zero added CO2). No new technology (battery storage) needed. However, if we're being realistic, you shouldn't expect any country to change much at all, and you'll find out how many people fear nuclear more than they fear fossil fuels.
In the link I posted above there are 15 sovereign nations which produce a higher CO2 per capita than the US. (As an aside, several of those countries have a strong interest in selling oil, so you aren't likely to sway them.) If you treat per capita as the important metric, and you successfully convince those 15 countries to go pure solar/nuclear/whatever, you've solved less than 5% of the problem. Lock your heels and stick to your guns, refuse to admit you're wrong, but this is an inefficient approach.
Contrast that with converting just China, the US, and India, to wind/geothermal/whatever and you've solved 50%.
> Theoretically, most countries emissions could go to zero with nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and/or geothermal.
I think this is the bad assumption that is causing you to think emissions per capita are not important. Power generation is only a fraction of the problem. Most clearly, GHG emissions from cows and pigs will not go down even if all electricity energy is produced with 0 emissions. Incidentally, India's widespread vegetarianism may be a big component of how its emissions are so low.
Then, transportation will not magically become electric even if the whole grid is green. Perhaps cars are a solved problem, but electric trucks, electric air planes, and electric cargo boats are definitely not solved problem, not for anywhere near today's costs.
There are of course numerous other industrial processes which emit massive amounts of CO2 that can't be electrified at all - cement production, smelting, plastic recycling, many chemical processes etc.
Also, new nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind are not competitive with already built coal or natural gas power plants - so moving to a new entirely green grid would massively increase the costs of electricity, which in turn will increase the costs of basically all consumer goods.
And while many in the USA and Europe could afford to pay twice the price of electricity and all basic necessities (though nowhere close to all), few would in India or China.
Now, would it be important and good to pressure and fund China, US and India to replace what they can of their electrical grids with nuclear and other green energies? Absolutely! But it only addresses a small part of the problem, and does so at tremendous cost.
Edit: electricity generation accounts for ~50% of China's GHG emissions, ~35% of India's and ~25% of the US's. So even entirely greenifying their grids will not reduce world GHG emissions by anywhere near 50%.
Take your argument to its logical conclusion and maybe you'll see the contradiction: Qatar has the worst CO2 emissions per capita, so clearly that's where you should focus your efforts.
> Also, new nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind are not competitive with already built coal or natural gas power plants [...] costs
While this is completely true, if you stick to financial justification for changes, you aren't going to succeed anywhere. If any of the other methods were more cost effective in the short term, they'd already have switched.
I doubt it's fruitful to talk about any of this. You seem pretty certain you're right, and I doubt I could change your mind on anything.
> Qatar has the worst CO2 emissions per capita, so clearly that's where you should focus your efforts.
That's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing that no one country, or even small group of countries, can stop climate change alone, at least not without causing massive harm to their citizens. The entire world needs to participate, and countries that are producing the most GHG for the least amount of people need to do so most of all (though of course once you get to really really small countries, say Luxembourg, other factors become dominant).
My point is that India, particularly, can't realistically reduce emissions (without harming their citizens tremendously in the short term) by more than a few percents. Meanwhile, Europe, the Middle Eastern oil states, Russia, and the USA have much more room to reduce their emissions more drastically, and, combined, they will have a bigger effect, with much less harm to their own people. China absolutely needs to do more as well, and for them in particular green energy generation is lower hanging fruit (since so much of their emissions are coming from this).
The goal of this whole thing is to move as fast as possible to ensure the planet remains livable 100 years from now, without sacrificing poor peasants' already meager lifestyles in China and India (and anywhere else) today.
And now sure, an argument could be made that rather than building nucelar reactors in France, French money could be better invested in building nuclear reactors in China - that is, that the world's limited capacity for building green energy should be best invested in the places that need power the most while currently having the worst way of getting it. I would be amenable to such an argument, though I think it's more utopic than my previous ones.
Given enough time climate change will have a drastic impact on human quality of life and it's the poorer parts of the world that will feel it most.
We seem to be going through stages of climate denialism: Climate change doesn't exist -> it does exist but it isn't man made -> it is man made but it's too expensive and disruptive to fix -> ???
> Large, influential emitters like China and India will not play ball.
This is not true. We are all in the same frying pan and I don't know why people keep insisting that the others don't understand it. Of course they do. They have political pressures from industrialists and deniers just as we do here that might prevent immediate action, but they are not fundamentally different. Quite the opposite.
Either way, why do we have to wait for others to move first. We know there's a problem, we know there are solutions, get to it.
Even if the choice was between quality of life now and addressing climate change you haven't made a convincing argument for why maintaining peoples quality of life as it is now is worth risking a mass extinction event in the future.
That being said I see no reason why doing any of the things mainstream scientists and economists are calling for would in any way diminish anyone's quality of life. If anything it will improve quality of life at the very least by reducing air pollution and it will prevent drastic reductions in quality of life in the coming decades from the effects of unchecked global warming.
I really don't know where this crap even comes from. Like we get x amount of energy from fossil fuels. Therefore we must reduce energy usage by that much? Do you think that's what we're advocating for?
So methane control is a significant handle to control global warming. It is not a solution but it will buy time if we globally "burn" methane to COP2. See BlueDotChange.org.
> Wouldn’t this make it far less concerning than CO2 with its half life of 120 years?
In the pre-industrial era the oceans outgassed CO2 to the atmosphere to prevent land plants from suffocating themselves by sequestering all the carbon dioxide. In the post-industrial era the oceans capture a significant percentage of the CO2 that humans generate (because CO2 is heavier than air, and easily dissolves in water).
The most important considerations for the earth's atmospheric heat balance are the heat inputs from the sun (solar cycle) and underwater volcanoes, and the shielding provided by volcanic eruptions. The oceans store heat during the summer, and release heat during the winter.
If we haven’t fired the clathrate gun already, I’m personally convinced it is inevitable in the next ~decade. Practically no one I talk to, who are generally concerned about climate change, have the same fear I do about the clathrate gun and most just point to the Wikipedia article downplaying it as “proof” it isn’t a big deal. While it is super depressing to think we have already lost the climate change battle, intelligent people keeping their heads in the sand and not seriously looking at what the next steps are assuming the clathrate gun has already fired are doing a huge disservice to humanity. Absolutely none of the 2030/2050/2100 climate change measures are taking this into account and it is mind boggling to me.
Note the "current outlook" section, where the TL;DR: is that this is not happening and there is pretty good reason to believe it won't over predictable time-frames.
I hadn't thought of carbon emissions in terms of half lives before. I thought that carbon emissions (presumably from fossil fuels) were more of a permanent change.
The carbon used to be deep underground, and now it's in the atmosphere. Where does half of it go? I know that it ends up as part of a photosynthetic organism, but then later that plant decays and its back in the atmosphere again, right?
And given a changing climate, can we rely on the atmosphere->plant rate remaining constant for enough for our ideas about the half lives of various greenhouse gasses to remain relevant?
Methane breaks down into CO2 and water in a few years, which is why half life of methane is relevant.
My understanding is that for CO2, thinking in terms of half-life is less relevant, the CO2 goes to plants and to the ocean, and if those two sinks are at saturation, then CO2 levels in the atmosphere will keep increasing.
Some amount of carbon is sequestered by plants getting buried when they die, though not as much as in the past because we have well- slated decay organisms in the biosphere. Some makes its way into the sea and gets stuck there. And a decent chunk is bound up as carbonate minerals from the weathering of the Earth (one of the future biosphere death states is when this process outstrips CO2 production due to the increase in the sun's luminosity about 700 million years from now).
When it rains, Co2 in atmosphere leaches the calcium in rocks forming calcium carbonate that runs off to the sea eventually. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our actions leave their mark on some ancient seabed, as a thick white stone(like Dover, England) . The higher the Co2 in the atmosphere, the more it rains, because more water evaporates due to higher temperature, causing faster reduction of Co2 in the atmosphere. Thus there is a natural balance in the cycle. Unfortunately for us, it is way slower than the speed with which we pumped the Co2 out. It takes tens of millions of years to get back to preindustrial levels (of < 200 ppm) Co2
While Methane has a shorter half-life it is also a much more effective GHG. The common way to look at this is Global Warming Potential, which is measure in CO2 equivalents. You can find this on the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
Notice that you can look at the GWP potential over time spans. For methane, over the next 100 years (which is the period that will impact most HNers the most) it is at least 20x as impactful as CO2.
The reason this matters is because the biggest unknown with climate change is positive feed backs. A classic example of this is that as the arctic has less ice it also reduces the albedo of the oceans allowing them to absorb even more heat faster.
Another, methane related, theoretical, positive feed back is methane clathrates which are essentially frozen stores of methane deep in the arctic ocean. If the ocean were to warm up enough this might rapidly release methane leading to a catastrophic runaway warming scenario, leading to what is suspected to have caused rapid climate change in the Quanternary period [1].
It is currently believed by many researchers that, in the specific case of the 'clathrate gun' firing, it is unlikely to happen. The trouble is we don't know for sure. That is just one unknown, potentially devastating positive feed back.
If you read Peter Ward's work (and some others as well) it looks like at various times in the history of the planet there was very rapid, very destructive climate change that was caused by a cascading series of positive feed backs. We don't know exactly where these are, but the more methane we release (and CO2) and the faster the planet warms the more likely we are to find these.
It is important to note also, that these positive feedbacks are not factored into the IPCC report (just like the potential collapse of Thwaites Glacier is not) because the is no way to effectively model this and make predictions about them. It means that if you think the IPCC report sounds bad (or even if you don't) there is a lot of potential risk not mentioned in the various pathways there.
Depends on how much methane ends up in the atmosphere. A lot of methane released in a short time, could end up having very dramatic effects. For example, Siberian permafrost melting and releasing a lot of methane would probably have some measurable and dramatic, but short term effects. However, the addition of a couple of giga tons of methane released per year is not going to help slow that melting process down. If that's a process that lasts a few decades/centuries, it would raise methane levels more or less permanently throughout that period. It would recover once methane release stops/slows down.
We'd be looking at a very different planet by then with higher see levels, higher temperatures, and a lot less ice on Greenland, Antartica, and most mountains. You can haggle about just how bad things would get in terms of temperature rises, and sea level rises. But lets just say it wouldn't be very good. It would recover eventually. But the problem is that that recovery process is going to take thousands of years.
the answer, or part of it, lies with methane clathrate [0]
> a large amount of methane is trapped within a crystal structure of water, forming a solid similar to ice. Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the Solar System, where temperatures are low and water ice is common, significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of the Earth.
deposits of solid methane ice can exist trapped on the seafloor [1]. this is possible only at the extreme pressures of the seafloor [2].
so, on its own, a little methane in the atmosphere is not a big deal, because of the short half-life.
except, you have methane ice deposits in the ocean that can melt if the oceans get a little bit warmer.
this can enter into a fun little runaway feedback loop pretty quickly. little bit of methane melts, causing a little bit more ocean warming, causing more methane to melt, etc.
if this feedback loop were to occur, the evidence you would expect to see would be spontaneous release of methane emissions from the ocean, and you would expect it to be happening in places where the warming ocean put methane clathrates right at their melting point for that depth & pressure of seawater. which...is exactly what's happening [3]
> The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, shows that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.
> "We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane hydrate would decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul Johnson, a UW professor of oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just emitted from the sediments; this appears to be coming from the decomposition of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."
a similar feedback loop is possible in the Arctic tundra [4], where permafrost can melt and release trapped bubbles of gases that include methane, which in turn will warm the planet a bit and cause more permafrost to melt.
and of course the two feedback loops are able to reinforce each other, because a bit of methane released from the arctic also helps heat the oceans, and a bit of methane released by the oceans also helps melt the permafrost.
Note: I work at a startup working on removing methane from the atmosphere.
Responding to several comments: yes, we need to get rid of the excess CO2. In fact when CH4 is broken down (mostly via hydroxyl† or, over oceans, Cl reactions) you end up with CO2 anyway.
So, as you ask, why worry about CH4?
The radiative forcing function of CH4 is, depending on your baseline, 30-80X‡ worse than C02. The rise in methane levels from 750 ppbv to 1900 ppbv is believed to have raised the temperature by as much as 0.5 C. So eliminating it buys more time to work on other problems.
The second problem is you can't really eliminate* emissions -- they come from diverse sources, almost all of them natural. You can see this in that the 750 ppbv level that was reasonably flat before the widespread adoption of the steam engine (around 1775 when Watt and Boulton got their patent)** -- emission and oxidation/removal were roughly balanced. Another way to look at it is that 1900 ppbv today was all emitted over the last decade, whether "naturally" or not.
I put "naturally" in quotation marks because yes, some would be emitted anyway without humans, but most of the emissions that come from humans are from biological activity that would not otherwise have occurred: primarily agriculture, but also fossil fuel extraction. If we somehow stopped all the latter it would cut anthropogenic emission by perhaps a third; livestock maybe the same amount, or maybe half in aggregate. But you aren't going to stop growing crops or dumping stuff in landfill.
And many of these sources are quite diffuse; oilfields result in lots of seepage, and who can fit a catalytic converter to a swamp?
And of course methane bursts from melting tundra heating continental shelves and the like -- not sure anybody has an idea how much of that there is. You can see craters from these bursts if you walk around in the arctic. And as the article mentions, it's not just the frozen methane, but as the frozen tundra melts decomposition accelerates. One can imagine a significantly large offshore burst that could wipe out agriculture for a few years -- probably a bad thing if you are a fan of vertebrates.
If you want to know what human activity bugs me the most, its not livestock, it's a transition to natural gas (methane, basically) as a "greener" fuel for transport, heating and electricity generation. More gas means more leaks and emissions and further cooking of the planet. And when those ships have been launched and power plants built they'll be in operation for decades because of that's how long they'll take to depreciate. The EU has come out in favor of this; the IMO is encouraging shipping to make the transition, and of course some countries depend on its export.
PS: everyone makes cow fart jokes but a point of trivia: it's actually cow burps as the cow is a ruminant.
† For unknown reasons OH levels last year seem to have dropped. Eek!
‡ These calculations are arcane, depending on what parameters you're trying to compare. We just use 30X in the company.
* There are various projects to eradicate point sources: barns, landfills, some old mines. We need more of that too.
** OK, obviously some coal was burnt before the Boulton and Watt engine and adoption was not instantaneous but you can see the bend right around the end of the 18th century.
Edit: add the point about gas being considered a "green" fuel.
Which is terrifying: the methane threat or that someone is addressing it?
We're in the stage of scaling up a process from lab scale to deployment scale. Most of the theoretical and experimental science in this area has been done at institutions in Germany, France and Denmark and while the company is international the engineering development is in SV.
TBH there's a lot more to do than just some engineering and validation: regulation, environmental studies, social acceptance, etc -- about as much as engineering itself.
The company is named Blue Dot Change (bluedotchange.com) -- trying to restore the planet to the lovely blue dot from the photos from space. Yes all startups ultimately need a new, less nerdly name. Right now the web site doesn't say much -- basically clip art and a little text.
Since this is HN:
- The architecture is nice: a large number of small devices, which allows a lot of scaling and all the other nice operational and cost features you'd expect (but no, no need for some sort of k8s to manage them :-).
- Yes, we're hiring: experienced ME, EE, and ChemE; in a few months we'll need a couple of more deep embedded/instrumentation programmers.
- And we are continuing to fundraise, by pre-selling carbon credits. Since we are making relatively small devices, we don't need one of those crazy $100MM rounds you'd need to develop a new kind of oil refinery or nuke. If we do decide we need that for some crazy phase of scaling we can to that then.
Actually CH4 is pretty well distributed, especially in the northern hemisphere . The pictures / videos you linked to were emissions pictures. We have some good concentration maps we generated from from the ESA Copernicus Tropomi data. I don't know how to link to those internal pictures, but you can probably find similar images right on an ESA site or one of the university sites that use the data.
As for concentration: that's an excellent question. I'm not sure how much I should say right now (though as soon as some of the scientists appear on our website it'll be obvious from their publication record, if the comms "team" -- really just part of one person -- hasn't already written more by then). I can tell you that the lab work we are scaling up just used outside air -- a pipe stuck out the window -- as its air source, not some special high concentration mixture made in the lab.
I believe you can buy home water filters that extract higher molecular weight contaminants like arsenic in low ppb levels, but I'm not sure how applicable that really is :-)
Wonder how much damage the billions of gallons of off gassing is costing the country and world from the Bakken fracking fields (North Dakota, eastern Montana)
I think you're right. So many models excluded these extremes as they were too unpredictable in their effects and really, should they happen, it's game over. But so frequently real world observations have been "more extreme, and faster than expected".
Well. We had a good run. Time to pack up the board.
To add to this a bit: if increased atmospheric heat is _causing_ the release of greenhouse gases, then directly reducing the temperature of the atmosphere might be the only way to slow down that release. Secondly, since there is a positive feedback loop here, the earlier and more decisively we act to directly reduce the temperature, the less such geoengineering we will need to do. Right now we only need to counteract X parts per million of methane in the atmosphere, but in the future we would need to counteract X+Y parts per million, necessitating a bigger geoengineering response.
Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two.
EDIT: this apparently is one of my most disliked comments. To clarify, my point is that we can’t have both unlimited population growth and a high quality of life without accepting environmental impacts. If a high population of people have to crowd into dense micro apartments and give up cars and face constant bans on things they like, then their environmental footprint may reduce but their quality of life will go down. On the other hand if population controls were instituted, then a high quality of life could be possible with a sustainable level of environmental impact.
> Many humans. Rich life (individual freedoms and high material quality of life). Low environmental impact. Pick two.
I really don't buy this, it seems illogical to me.
We have technologies that can produce a rich and comfortable life with much less or zero emissions, nuclear, renewables. We don't need to fuck stuff up as bad as we have. We've fucked stuff up this bad because of lobbying, resources companies have lobbied and fought long and hard to keep selling this poison to the world. To keep us buying cars that use petroleum. To keep people believing that it's either oil and coal or you're going back to the stone age it's bull shit because oil and coal is the stone age.
If you buy into those technologies I've mentioned above, you don't really have to entirely give up the life you know, in fact you might get to keep the life you love and have cleaner, better air to breathe.
We've woken up, but we still have those cretins doing their dirty work (the Australian Government for example.
We're already way beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, without fossil fuel inputs.
There are only two options:
1. Split more nuclei, fuse nuclei at +EROEI, and collect more photons.
2. 4 billion people starve to death.
Population control was a fun idea in the 1970s, but that ship has already sailed. We either experience mass die-offs, or we engineer our way out. Full stop.
If we can't live comfortably on earth (even with the worst expected effects from climate change), how can we live on another planet or in outer space which has a far less hospitable environment than any climate change could cause here on earth.
I think of space colonies as being protection from some catastrophic event on earth, not as an answer to climate change.
It's not like we could move significant numbers of people off the planet... and if we can build a spaceship or habitat on another planet that people can survive (and thrive) in, it would be much much easier to build the same habitat here on earth. I would bet that even building an underwater city would be much easier than a moon colony or orbiting space station.
Yeah, I've had that thought often enough. If we can't make people enjoy living in (insert least popular region in your cultural environment), how would anybody want to live in space/the moon/on Mars?
These days it's flanked by a much darker counter: well at least space would provide a society that has reproduction under control with a reasonably wide moat from breeders.
It means creating such an abundance of technology that we will be able to supplant the limitations that we are currently operating under so that we can fundamentally alter our opportunities as a species.
Rather than spending the next few hundred years going round and round in ever-decreasing circles, obsessing over reducing the human impact on the planet to negligible levels using limited technological advances, while remaining largely inward-looking and ensconced within our gravity well.
I find that there's a weird mixture of pessimism (billions will die of starvation within 30 years) and hubris (we need to adopt measure X so that we can achieve Y degrees of warming by 2050, rather than Y+1 degrees) that has categorised the more prominent Malthusian technocrats over the last few decades (such as the Club of Rome, and then the IPCC).
Pretty much. We're definitely gonna fail to do anything significant about any of this crap until it forcibly ends the way everyone actually lives their lives.
Heroic doses of psychedelics don't seem to prevent Burners from participating in the most absurd gratuitous waste of resources that is every BM event. I'm afraid it's not a panacea.
It’s not for a lack of intention though. Lack of critical thinking and maybe justifying the cost? Yes. But in general it seems to be the fastest route to making people realize that they are not more important than the whole.
It has to be done in secret, by purely good intentioned third party that has some sort of leverage over the people in power.
This group should have one sole purpose of dosing the people in power and otherwise not be allowed to have any further influence.
Until our selection mechanisms choose the purest intentioned people rather than expedient and selfish profiteers, the people in power will be driven to optimize objective functions that aren’t conducive for humanity. In the short term, the best way to fix this would be to reveal what is truly happening around them and force them to confront the consequences of their actions and lack thereof.
This is very different from the game they have become so familiar with and content with playing.
That would be preferable yes, but think about if even the meme gained widespread popularity, especially among the young. If some people could start to wake up and realize how absurd, how fake our so called democracy is, and start to outright mock it and the normies who continue to blindly worship it as our most sacred institution, perhaps we could squeeze a 5% or so improvement in behavior out of them, for a few years anyways until another patch is realized to wipe that belief from people's minds.
That should be the new HN tagline, I'm honestly a bit surprised to see this article still on the front page. Usually concerning facts get flagged pretty quickly.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
Link to methane, click on one of the four switched at the top for the others.
Warning: It always is pretty depressing to visit this site.
You can also check out a tab "Growth Rate", for CO2 for example it's https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html -- which is even more depressing. Even the rate(!) increases!
.
So, I'm mid-life, and I do what many might say is actually interesting and useful software work, no standard stuff, lots of new things to design and plan and implement in a small software company I co-founded in a team that works well together. Currently we do most of our work for the health sector. Still, I can't take it too seriously. I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture. I'm not demotivated or depressed, it's more the opposite, I can't feel excited about any achievements because I think that most of what we do, what people do these days, is just keeping busy to avoid facing the bigger reality. The show must go on. I've developed the feeling that what we have, even in the rich countries, is much more fragile than people realize.
Unless there is a full stop of digging up any more carbon from below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and I mean full stop and not just a reduction, the amount of carbon in the above ground carbon cycle is going to keep increasing. No amount of trees planted or most of he other measures proposed will change that. How likely is that to happen?