Indeed. And two countries most emboldened by a Trump presidency? Russia and China. China, US, Russia are the 3 top contributors to global warming by a significant margin.
China has 60% more CO2 emissions than the United States, but Trump's promise to wage war on clean energy while investing heavily in coal and oil, there's a good chance US will be back to #1.
So I guess the question is will civilization ultimately perish from climate change or nuclear war? With Trump at the helm, it's hard to say which happens first, but we can conclude that we're all fucked.
For people outside the USA who may naively conflate "elected" with "the majority of the voters voted for", I feel the need to point out that this is not what happened.
Clinton did not get the majority by that much. A very significant portion of the public voted for this leader and the party espousing similar anti-science position all the way down the ticket.
Agreed, but in democracies a special status is conferred upon the majority. The majority of voters did not vote for this idiot. It's a really important point.
You'll find that in many countries the leader was not voted by a majority, in parliamentary republics which are based on coalitions or with various voting methods the leader can effectively be someone who did not get anywhere near the majority of the vote.
This is slightly off topic, but the fact that Trump got as many votes as he did, or that Hillary did not get way more votes that a person running against Trump should have, shows how bad of a candidate she was.
She was not even very popular with women. Democrats screwed themselves.
Yeah, and its not only about the carbon dioxide that must be captured safely, when its emitted. Its also about the dirty and energy consuming business of getting the coal out of the earth crust in the first place. The term "clean coal" is just ... I would laugh if it weren't so sad.
Carbon sequestration is expensive. It might just be much more cheaper and cleaner to build 4th gen nuclear power plants. Or geothermal for that matter.
Will the world come up with a plan to actually curb carbon emissions as much as we need to? Remove carbon?
A wide scale rises in temperature and other problems?
A huge impact on standard of living (setting us back X years)
A near extinction of humans? Full?
Or somewhere else on the scale, or somewhere distinct from my portrayal?
I'm really not sure personally. I'm recently veering towards the last on the list, a near extinction of humans. If I'm very optimistic, just a large rise in temperature and drop in standard of living. But then perhaps I'm being very overly pessimistic.
My informed amateur pontification: Realistically I think we're looking at a mass extinction event for sure. Big land fauna and ocean ecosystems are half there already, and only partially because of carbon emissions. Conservation will preserve many of these species in isolated reserves (or maybe just zoos), but the ecosystems themselves are toast.
Longer term, though, trends look good. Due to new technology, renewable power is getting cheaper almost as fast as carbon sources are getting more expensive, and the crossover is probably going to be within our lives. Given that, and the ability of the oceans to sink HUGE amounts of CO2 over thousand-year timescales, I'd say that permanent climate damage may never really come to pass.
So... no suffocation of life on earth, no human extinction. Just a mild dystopia where people have to read wikipedia to understand what a forest is supposed to look like.
> we're looking at a mass extinction event for sure
Curiously, this ongoing mass extinction event has a name already -> Holocene Extinction[1].
> The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the Sixth extinction[1] or Anthropocene extinction,[2] is the ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch (11,700 years before AD 2000) mainly due to human activity.
My understanding is that the ongoing extinction event is not showing any signs of slowing down and is likely accelerating.
Any hope of taking action to reverse it evaporated Tuesday night. The Paris climate agreement is now dead and any followup conferences are doomed for at least 2 years and almost certainly at least 4.
> Given that, and the ability of the oceans to sink HUGE amounts of CO2 over thousand-year timescales
Are you not concerned about the impacts of ocean acidification as a result? My understanding is that the ramifications of that are potentially scary as well.
"studies have shown that a more acidic environment has a dramatic effect on some calcifying species, including oysters, clams, sea urchins, shallow water corals, deep sea corals, and calcareous plankton. When shelled organisms are at risk, the entire food web may also be at risk. Today, more than a billion people worldwide rely on food from the ocean as their primary source of protein. Many jobs and economies in the U.S. and around the world depend on the fish and shellfish in our oceans."
My understanding is that this is a near-term effect, just like the current climate effects are. Mixing into the deep ocean happens on hundreds-of-years timescales and will eventually absorb everything we're emitting today without significant net Ph change.
So, it's really bad, but not irreversible or unmitigatable (again, from the "human extinction" angle).
And as far as the "billion people" thing goes: yeah. Disruption is unavoidable. Nonetheless there is sufficent arable land to feed the world, and alternative ocean-sourced proteins exist (jellyfish, say) that are unexploited for historical reasons.
Which, too, is really bad. But not apocalypse-level bad, just mass extension bad.
I believe that if we put our minds to it, we could certainly turn back the tide. I don't think we have the mind for it, though. And with Trump appointing a climate-change denier to the EPA... well, that's going to hit the pause button for 4-8 years, and I don't think we have the time to pause.
There is an alternate universe where we took this threat seriously 10-15 years ago and have made great strides to curb the sources of the problem, and are even working on reversing the effects on the oceans, etc.
That suggests that climate change is primarily an intellectual challenge. That if we were less stupid it would have all been ok. Maybe we need more anger and passion to actually pursuade people on moral grounds. That that environment is a matter of basic human rights. And poisoning our planet and fellow humans is sinful.
I'm of the unpopular opinion that climate change has the potential to be a net positive for humanity over the long term:
+ Protecting coastal (and some inland) populations against higher water levels will be huge infrastructure projects that will allow us to re-imagine cities, many of which are even now burdened by very ancient designs and infrastructure. This will be a great use of resources that will put people to work on grand and civically engaging projects. Work to be proud of.
+ New coastal land will be created and deserts will slowly re-green, encouraging populations to migrate to and develop areas previously thought worthless. With that we'll have an opportunity to build thoughtful, efficient cities and the infrastructure to connect them from the ground up. Imagine the wealth and opportunities, economic and political, that would be created developing Greenland, Antarctica, or the Sahara.
+ Total potential agricultural output of the world will increase drastically, possibly making food cheaper for all.
+ Human civilization will be forced to recognize that we exist at the mercy of a bountiful Earth, which might make some of those other celestial bodies a bit more appealing.
Of course some obvious consequences will be painful, but I think change isn't automatically bad, and that the best of humanity always comes through during periods of non-violent adversity. A slow but certain and predictable warming of the Earth's climate is just that.
Although without sufficient oxygen production globally, new coastal property would be of limited value! Would be interesting to see peer reviews of the study to get a sense of how problematic this might be. I guess worst case we could all get oxygen tanks to carry around, but it'd be a bit of a shame . . .
I'm curious as to what supports the idea that deserts will re-green and agricultural output will increase? I am not at all an expert in the field, but I've always heard desertification and disappearing arable land as chief concerns of global warming, so I'd like to learn more.
The increasing temperatures speed up evaporation in the water cycle which has a lot of impact on rainfall. Since wind speeds aren't increasing overall while temperature is, this means that rain clouds store more water and travel farther across land. This also means that the radius of the strip around the equator that can be considered tropical grows and pushes other biomes outward. The further north you get the more land becomes available for farming and if rains can reach them, a lot of fertile land will be unlocked for agriculture.
That's the theory anyway. The current impact of that evaporation seems to be increasing frequency and strength of hurricanes and monsoons. It is really hard to get fine grained reliable data on temperature and humidity across the entire planet, let alone account for unknown factors, so specific medium to long term impacts on agriculture are hard to pin down.
>Will the world come up with a plan to actually curb carbon emissions as much as we need to? Remove carbon?
Not in time. Unless the plan involves some form of genocide. But even genocide probably won't be fast enough without weapons of mass destruction.
> A wide scale rises in temperature and other problems?
That's not really a prediction anymore. The only question here is about the degree to which it rises and what the progression of the rise will look like (better or worse than log(n)?)
> A huge impact on standard of living (setting us back X years)
I think I'm going to start using the "entitlement of living" instead of standard of living here. Much of the western lifestyle seems purposefully wasteful, with planned obsolescence, unreasonable luxury and commitment to wasteful planning (suburbia, etc.) The reduction is inevitable, but the question here again, is of scale and time.
>A near extinction of humans? Full?
A near extinction of western civilization lifestyle. Possible split into 2 subspecies based on education, wealth and deliberate exclusion. I don't believe humans will become extinct on the Holocene scale (tens of thousands of years), but the difference between the current civilization and somewhere, say in 2500 might be staggering. Then again, humans are notoriously bad at planning at long time scales, so the year 3000 might be just as good as now or even better (but with the caveat of, say, vastly reduced population, perhaps of only 200-300 million worldwide)
>Or somewhere else on the scale, or somewhere distinct from my portrayal?
It seems you've made several very different portrayals that cover pretty much the entire scale of possibilities (catastrophic to optimistic).
The good news is this: under status quo we can probably expect to live reasonably well in our lifetimes.
The bad news is: if we want our future generations to live better than us, we have to consciously live much more frugally now and enact changes that might seem horrible and regressive to the current western mentality.
I think humanity is slowly coming to an understanding that the planet really was a zero-sum game all along and that the period of unprecedented wealth and fossil fuel exploitation will come to an end eventually.
The most optimistic predictions (as of July when I last checked in on it) have us hitting emissions targets with room to spare before the changes become irreversible. Most of the realistic ones had us barely making it, but still squeaking by. With this week's revelations, not sure that will be possible anymore... but to say the only reasonable plan involves genocide is ignorant. Renovating emissions-producing buildings, riding more bikes, motorcycles, and efficient vehicles, efficient appliances, iterating on renewable energy sources until they are cheaper than oil - all possible within 30 years if we can focus hard enough on making such a lifestyle palatable to consumers.
>>Will the world come up with a plan to actually curb carbon emissions as much as we need to? Remove carbon?
>Not in time. Unless the plan involves some form of genocide. But even genocide probably won't be fast enough without weapons of mass destruction.
Well, we're on track to address that problem. Russia is stepping up their nuclear programs, America has a man with little self-discipline in charge of the final decision, India & Pakistan really dislike each other, Iran is ignoring the nuclear treaty, and I'm sure Israel has a few nukes to spare as well.
On the upside, the following nuclear winter will mitigate some of the greenhouse effects for a while, so we've got that going for us.
> The good news is this: under status quo we can probably expect to live reasonably well in our lifetimes.
That will be until roughly 2050, when things will go somewhat pear-shaped. So if you're younger than, say, 35 right now? Ooops. Sorry.
> I think humanity is slowly coming to an understanding that the planet really was a zero-sum game all along
Alas, it also understand that after they're dead, things don't really matter to them. And so we're in a race to extract maximum value in our lifetimes. We're pretty much doomed.
> That will be until roughly 2050, when things will go somewhat pear-shaped. So if you're younger than, say, 35 right now? Ooops. Sorry.
That's why Millenials are at a turning point. Do I just live it up trying to extract maximum value from my life before 70? Or do I really put in maximum effort into making Earth habitable for future generations?
I'm just a monkey with a lizard brain, how can I possibly make an informed choice for the future 10-20 generations? And the choice is pointless without at least a 90% consensus.
I think there's much more to it than just climate change.
It's a whole host of issues caused by humans.
For one, we're over-fishing the oceans and putting massive strain on the ocean ecosystem. Mix that with polluting the oceans and rivers.
Mix that, with massively transforming the landscape around the world. Building roads/cities, damning rivers, and chopping down vast areas of the rain forest. Disrupting natural animal migration patterns. Leading to a mass extinction event.
Plus on top of all of that, climate change. The world can only take so much abuse. Yet, we seem hell bent on pushing that as far as we possibly can. Very dangerous game to play in my opinion. By hey, the economy.
It's not all disaster. There are people ripping out old, small dams (with minimal hydroelectric value) in the US and fish are returning! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_removal
That would probably require an international coalition to pull off. The hard part is building enough power plants that are nearly carbon neutral at a big enough scale to make a dent because the scale of the problem is... well, planetary.
1 gallon of gas contains 33.4 kWh (this is a standard unit and can be converted to an equivalent volume of natural gas) so assuming we can convert electricity and carbon dioxide to gasoline at a 33% efficiency that's 100 kWh of carbon neutral power needed for every 33.4 kWh of gasoline. If we assume that we get a 50% effeciency converting the fuel to energy (highest efficiency achieved so far with state of the art natural gas plants but more than twice that of an auto ICE) we'd need over 1 MWh for every 167 KWh of energy produced using fossil fuels and this is probably way too unrealistic for a best case scenario. Technology capable of 33% efficient energy and CO2 to fuel conversion is extremely unlike to happen for a very long time and ICEs are way less efficient than natural gas power plants.
For example, you'd have to grow California's energy output by about three times using only renewables or nuclear just to make up for the CO2 from its natural gas power plants and that's not including what you'd need to make up for rush hour traffic. It would literally be cheaper for California buy all of the natural gas plants at original value and replace them with renewables than to try to offset our CO2 output. Only once we replace all large scale fossil fuel energy sources can we start thinking about carbon sequestration or conversion.
I'm a climate change skeptic. I think there are a lot more factors at play than these models are using.
A lot of people seem to believe these models are right more out of fear than a rational validation of the models themselves. On top of that, creators of these models seem to be tripping over each other to come up with more outlandish results.
Part of my skepticism is the timescales that we're working with. Other issues are perhaps a poor understanding of how the earth and everything on it might react to changing conditions.
If I'm wrong, I'm also ok with the weather getting hotter. From a livable land mass perspective, the human race will be much better off with a warmer earth than another ice age.
And finally, how is it that it's currently more socially/scientifically acceptable to believe that matter can travel faster than light than it is to be a climate change skeptic? Science is never settled, unless it's a computer model predicting the future? I hope I'm not the only person who finds that ludicrous.
So here is my prediction: every generation of humans will have their boogeyman, religious apocalypse, nukes, GW, etc... but in the end an asteroid will cause a mass extinction event, just like it has before.
I'm not a climate scientist and don't play one on TV> It appears that most people who are (and are thus way better informed than me) have a consensus suggesting that climate change is both being caused by humans and lining up to be a problem. From flooding to sea level rises to changes in agriculture patterns and potential international conflicts over food/land. I don't know for sure that the climate scientists are right - it's possible they're all completely wrong. I also don't know for sure that the effects of climate change will be as predicted. I do however believe there is a reasonable chance that the majority of the specialists in this area are probably right. As such, there is a risk of anything from serious damage to an extinction level event. Given that until Elon gets his rockets going, an extinction level event on the earth would be very bad news for the human species, it seems prudent to me to look into ways of hedging and reducing the risk.
Especially given that just as the fears of climate change may be overblown, they may also be underestimated due to previously missed positive feedback loops of which we're unaware.
> On top of that, creators of these models seem to be tripping over each other to come up with more outlandish results.
Any evidence of that? Normally a range of scenarios get published and I haven't seen them get any more dramatic over the last 20 years. On top of that, many of the models have greatly underestimate the temperature increase.
>If I'm wrong, I'm also ok with the weather getting hotter. From a livable land mass perspective, the human race will be much better off with a warmer earth than another ice age.
You do realize that this will involve relocating massive amounts of our population and rebuilding all the infrastructure of coastal cities? We will also end up with a lot less good farmland than we have now to feed a growing population.
Nuclear annihilation should not be discussed as if it lies entirely in the past, either. There are thousands of warheads ready to be fired on a moment's notice. MAD didn't disappear with the fall of the Soviet Union, people just stopped paying attention to it.
> If I'm wrong, I'm also ok with the weather getting hotter. From a livable land mass perspective, the human race will be much better off with a warmer earth than another ice age.
No, it won't
> And finally, how is it that it's currently more socially/scientifically acceptable to believe that matter can travel faster than light than it is to be a climate change skeptic?
In which part of the Universe is more acceptable to believe that matter can travel faster than light?
"After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach."
The point is that scientists took a "wait and see" approach instead of lambasting them for releasing results that was so obviously wrong while pointing out that it's absolutely impossible that matter can travel faster than light.
I study this kind of stuff pretty heavily, because I have a teenage son who could (should!) be alive in the last quarter of the 21st century.
The chance that humans will go extinct is close to zero over the next 100 years. Even in the worst case scenarios, thousands of people with access to huge resources will do what it takes to survive in the long-term.
The biggest natural threat I see to society and civilization isn't sea level rise, even though that's going to become a huge problem.
I think there is a good chance that within the next 50 years, it will be very difficult to grow sufficient food for billions of humans. If my concern comes to pass, then billions of humans will die of starvation, and our society and civilization will be utterly changed, though I would not hazard to guess how.
The scenario is straightforward: in the past decade especially, global weather has gotten a lot more wild. We know that it is getting wilder, and many climatologists believe that the rate at which it is getting wild is increasing.
How does wild weather starve billions? Too much rain, too little rain, too much heat, too little heat and too much wind. Everywhere.
I think there's a chance that in the next 50 years, it will be difficult to find plots of earth that aren't exposed to crop killing weather over the course of a growing season.
We're already seeing the beginnings of this, all over the world, though the total human impact hasn't yet been extreme. Indeed, we live in extraordinarily stable times. I believe it's safe to say that the average level of food safety today is higher than it has ever been.
Hopefully I'm wrong, and as the overall global temperature warms, the weather's intensity won't increase, increasingly quickly.
PS: Most of the people reading this will be alive past 2050. Think carefully about how many '100 year' and '500 year' weather events have come about in the past few years. Also note that, 30 years ago when I was a teenager, a '100 year' or '500 year' weather event anywhere in the world would have been big news, because of how uncommon those events were. Last I checked, we've had something like six or seven '100 year' or '500 year' weather events just in the United States, just in the year 2016. My point is that unless you're digging, it's quite likely that you aren't aware of even a majority of such weather events worldwide. They just don't get consistent mainstream coverage anymore.
I predict that there might be an extra hurricane or two, and maybe some aquatic species will die, but that global warming isn't a threat to all human life on earth.
Some smart scientist will find a way to scrub CO2 out of the air if it becomes a serious problem, or there will be strong political consequences to being a polluting country. And then it won't be a problem any more.
Nature found a great way to both scrub and sequester CO2, with O2 as a waste product. Unfortunately we haven't exactly been investing in that technology.
This research is obviously bullocks, there were several periods in Earth's history that were a lot warmer than in the current age by a lot more than 6 degrees and oxygen production didn't stop.
For example, temperatures during the Paleocene–Eocene thermal mamimum were 8 degrees warmer than today and by all apperences there was enough oxygen to support the diverse fauna that existed then.
Similarly the Jurassic era had 5 times the CO2 of today's earth and much higher temperatures but also enough oxygen to support a variety of dinosaurs and other fauna 1.
You're assuming a lot here. The entire planetary biome was vastly different during the periods you mention. Your assertion hinges on the assumption that either phytoplankton were the primary source of atmospheric oxygen during these periods, or that modern phytoplankton can in fact withstand these changes in temperature and continue to make oxygen. Neither assumption seems to be well founded.
Of course Phytoplankton was always the biggest contributor to oxygen. Jurrasic was the age when flowering plants were first coming into being, to suggest that these plants could compete with plankton in oxygen production in any meaningful way seems absurd.
And more importantly what plankton we are taking about here isn't for me to address, it's something that would have been addressed in the paper were it worth anything. Are we talking about diatoms, cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates?
The biggest contributor to oxygen would be cyanobacteria, to think they can survive these billions of years and all these mass extinctions and temperature fluctuations and then stop working because of a 6 degree increase is also nonsensical.
Suffocation really isn't the big issue here. Phytoplankton generate energy via photosynthesis, so as the temperature of water – and this the concentration of gases that are dissolved inside – changes, so too will the organisms' biological fitness. Since they reproduce very rapidly, and their populations enormous, plankton will be able to mutate their enzymes to be more appropriate for the situation (down side from the genomic perspective – decreased biodiversity, especially in species without sexual reproduction).
The more pressing concern is that larger, more slowly-reproducing aquatic organisms will experience significant strain to accommodate their metabolic needs. For many fish, crustaceans, coral, and others: rapid change in dissolved content on the ocean will cause population loss.
Unless you can provide a source, I really doubt your first point. We already know of past bacterial mass extinctions that occurred due to climate change. They happened over much longer time scales than the ~80 years mentioned in this article, and phytoplankton evolve much more slowly than bacteria. There are limits to what evolution can overcome.
Oh, I never said that bacteria won't go extinct. Many will. I implied that from the decreased biodiversity part, but I should've made it more clear. Thing is, that because of their population sizes, there will always be outliers in terms of enzymatic activity. Mind, there are certainly limits. Species that survive such an event will be significantly different from their predecessors in the properties of their pathways. Nevertheless, seeing as many phytoplankta have life spans of several days, and that they inhabit large portions of the oceans, the removal of one 'species' of plankton from a region will likely open up the niche for another to inhabit. Life happens to contain enough competition to allow for life past mass extinctions. Different life, sure, but these self-replicating patterns are difficult to cull.
Unfortunately, entropy is a harsh mistress. Enzymes are catalysts and cannot do anything to change the equilibrium of a system. RuBisCo is the enzyme in autotrophs that fixes carbon dioxide into organic compounds, and that is a process that decreases entropy (two molecules form one). Increased temperature disfavors reactions that decrease entropy, and diminished dissolved CO2 further inhibits rate of carbon fixation.
True, enzymes cannot change the ∆G. However, there are many cases where an increased binding strength and rate of reactions using the products of the original reaction allow for a shift in equilibrium. Though, it may possibly make the system less profitable. I'm thinking of it from a biochemical perspective more so than a physical one, so take what I have written with a grain of salt. (For examples, you could look into the unprofitable steps of Glycolysis, Glyceraldehyde 3 Phosphate is not spontaneously used on its own, but the ATP used by the reaction ahead of it provides the impulse for the reaction before it. So long as the pathway is productive, they'll survive. (I enjoyed responding to this too much, thanks for the comment, mate))
A study led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics
from the University of Leicester’s Department of Mathematics,
has shown that an increase in the water temperature of the world’s
oceans of around six degrees Celsius – which some scientists predict
could occur as soon as 2100 - could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton
by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.
Disclaimer: I am a firm believer of global warming. Honest question: why is this study done by a professor in Applied Mathematics?
The title of the paper is "Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change". The research is trying to mathematically model plankton to determine how they will respond to global warming. That is why it is done by a professor in Applied Mathematics.
because you need a an extreamly complicated mathematical model if you want to make predictions within well defined "error bounds" and confidence (as in mathematical likelihood)
Basically, same reasons why supercomputers are usedto predict weather. Predicting climate is probably even harder
To expand on my comment, I think this is a sink or swim moment for humanity. I think we need a great leap in intelligence and technology to get out of this mess, either with AI or genetic engineering because we don't have centuries to come up with solutions and I don't think politics can solve it. It will take real technology to remove substantial amounts of CO2 from the environment, like small scale fusion, or self replicating solar along with efficient ways to remove CO2 from air. Nothing else will do I'm afraid.
I don't think it is the greatest filter, I have no idea what that might be.
But I absolutely agree that civilisations boiling or suffocating themselves out of existence, most likely through carbon dioxide, is a much greater filter than nuclear war or hostile extraterrestrials. Just look at Venus. If we have runaway, I just hope we might survive by darkening the skies, lowering our albedo. That hopefully seems like a survival (whatever that means in the context) strategy once chlorophyll fails us.
> Wouldn't darkening the skies raise albedo? Ideally we want more of the planet covered in snow, or, if that's not possible, deserts.
I probably should have said "reduce the amount of sunlight reaching us", i.e. make the place less bright from our perspective instead of "lowering our albedo", which is the opposite of the relevant outside view.
Not so long ago you could get burned at the stake for stating that the earth is not flat and not the middle of the universe. Only because 97 % of experts say something it does not mean that they are right. Maybe they are just afraid to state a not mainstream opinion. And with the statement "keep calm and go on with polluting the earth, it does not make any difference at all" could be hard to get financed the next north pole trip. We need some drama to talk about, they give us drama.
Right. Giordano Bruno did NOT believe in flat earth - NO ONE in his time did. His scientific schtick was heliocentrism. And there is no proof that he was burned for that reason -- it is mainly understood it was for religious doctrine reasons. Even if he was, the people who burned him are not analogous to the 97% of the scientific community.
And we (in the USA) just elected a leader who doesn't believe that humans have anything to do with climate change.