It’s pretty bizarre having accepted that my nephews will see more than two feet of sea level rise in their lifetimes. Florida will be different on the map, equatorial parts of the earth will...
It’s pretty bizarre having accepted that my nephews will see more than two feet of sea level rise in their lifetimes. Florida will be different on the map, equatorial parts of the earth will become less habitable, many snow capped mountains will be bare. Meanwhile the majority of the world is in true denial and sleepwalking into the anthropocene.
The situation is bleak. I pretend in my day-to-day life that some amazing carbon capture technique will be developed in the next decade or two and everything will be fine. The alternative is too...
The situation is bleak. I pretend in my day-to-day life that some amazing carbon capture technique will be developed in the next decade or two and everything will be fine. The alternative is too depressing.
I am ready for chem trails IRL now, or maybe some other attempts at climate engineering. I have been vehemently against that type of "solution" for a long time, but the effects of 2c rise are just...
I am ready for chem trails IRL now, or maybe some other attempts at climate engineering. I have been vehemently against that type of "solution" for a long time, but the effects of 2c rise are just the beginning. There is a paper showing mathematical models of plankton's O2 output at various sea temp rises. At 7C sea-temp rise, we pretty much lose 2/3 of our O2 generation. A paper based on that shows thatthere is a chance that we have complete human extinction within a few thousand years. Oxygen levels at sea-level would be what we have at the top of Mount Everest today, leading to mass extinction of all oxygen breathing life that has no artificial O2 supply.
The best argument I've heard to prove the first paper's conclussions wrong is that we had high temps on earth before, and the "plankton was fine." However, those temperatures took over a million years to get to their peak. We are making drastic changes over the course of just hundreds of years. Who knows if plankton can adapt fast enough to keep us breathing.
From my understanding, all of the research above is no guarantee of the extinction scenario, but just the chance made me open to the crazy ideas like a sun shield in space, or sulfur injected into the stratosphere, or give me something else please.
edit: I can't find anyone with whom to talk about this stuff. If you are able, please shoot that research down so we all sleep better.
Oh we're fucked without geoengineering at this point. Like, absolutely fucked. It's possible that if we'd started aggressively targeting CO2 emissions earlier, we wouldn't have needed to resort to...
Oh we're fucked without geoengineering at this point. Like, absolutely fucked. It's possible that if we'd started aggressively targeting CO2 emissions earlier, we wouldn't have needed to resort to borderline megaprojects, but the horse has left the barn and the republicans are still stopping us from even closing the door.
But compared to picking apart the worst of the worst case scenarios to help you sleep at night, or falling into a pit of despair and existential dread (I've done both), it's probably a better and more productive idea to start the conversation on what all geoengineering solutions are out there. It's surprising how reasonable some of them are. Best way to go I think would be to sink some money into an orbital ring, with launch prices falling the way they are, you could probably get one built for $10 or $20 billion. With something like that in place, you could transition the whole earth to solar without needing to worry about building terawatt hours worth of batteries, or the power antennae you'd need with traditional space based solar, you could just drop pretty traditional power cables to the relevant grid locations. And with the reduction of launch costs to negligible, you could also put up solar shades to start cooling the planet back down while we sequester all of the carbon we've put into the air.
Hey, I think about this shit all the time as my job requires I keep track of the future. Things are bad. Sorry. Always down to talk about it though. I'm not trying to be a dick or anything, but...
Hey, I think about this shit all the time as my job requires I keep track of the future.
Things are bad. Sorry.
Always down to talk about it though.
I'm not trying to be a dick or anything, but things are really that dire. We're only now starting to see the effects of emissions from the late-70's take hold. Things are probably going to get much worse as we continue to lose the polar ice, Earth's albedo lowers, all that methane in Siberia gets loose, the oceans warm and acidify, and we get that really fun positive-feedback loop going.
If nothing is done, anybody alive by the end of the century will be living in a very unfortunate world. We've known about this problem for 200 years. Only now that we're potentially past the atmospheric-carbon point of no return are we starting to give the idea a little more credence.
Thankfully, countries are setting goals to be renewable, carbon-neutral, have electric cars, and such by about mid-century. This is great. But what happens in the 2050's wont be felt until the 2090's. We've released a lot of carbon since the 80's, and we'll realizing that fact very soon.
Personally I think there's a pretty good chance of a societal collapse once our arable land goes to dust, and the fresh water crisis drives mass migration to the more fortunate areas. Nobody is equipped to handle that.
We're researching ways to mitigate this, but anything to get us back to 1950's level atmospheric-carbon will take a worldwide economic effort. There is some hope in biotechnologies to potentially engineer quickly reproducing and rapidly growing carbon-capturing organisms and such. I've read some literature on creating new peat bogs to sequester carbon too, but that takes time. We'll want a solution that works sooner rather than later. The problem is that most potential solutions either take a lot of time, or are incredibly difficult or costly to scale.
That was not quite what I was expecting. I'm not sure that trees flowering earlier is quite the same as Spring itself moving forward. It depends on what one's definition of "Spring" is. Is it an...
That was not quite what I was expecting. I'm not sure that trees flowering earlier is quite the same as Spring itself moving forward. It depends on what one's definition of "Spring" is. Is it an astronomical measure: the period from the vernal equinox to the summer solstice? Is it a calendrical measure: the period from 1st September to 30th November? Or is it a biological measure: the period when trees produce flowers? It seems to me that using biology to mark the seasons is a bit vague when there are trees that flower in the dead of Winter.
It’s pretty bizarre having accepted that my nephews will see more than two feet of sea level rise in their lifetimes. Florida will be different on the map, equatorial parts of the earth will become less habitable, many snow capped mountains will be bare. Meanwhile the majority of the world is in true denial and sleepwalking into the anthropocene.
The situation is bleak. I pretend in my day-to-day life that some amazing carbon capture technique will be developed in the next decade or two and everything will be fine. The alternative is too depressing.
I am ready for chem trails IRL now, or maybe some other attempts at climate engineering. I have been vehemently against that type of "solution" for a long time, but the effects of 2c rise are just the beginning. There is a paper showing mathematical models of plankton's O2 output at various sea temp rises. At 7C sea-temp rise, we pretty much lose 2/3 of our O2 generation. A paper based on that shows that there is a chance that we have complete human extinction within a few thousand years. Oxygen levels at sea-level would be what we have at the top of Mount Everest today, leading to mass extinction of all oxygen breathing life that has no artificial O2 supply.
The best argument I've heard to prove the first paper's conclussions wrong is that we had high temps on earth before, and the "plankton was fine." However, those temperatures took over a million years to get to their peak. We are making drastic changes over the course of just hundreds of years. Who knows if plankton can adapt fast enough to keep us breathing.
Here is the springer.com citation list of papers which used the paper linked above.
From my understanding, all of the research above is no guarantee of the extinction scenario, but just the chance made me open to the crazy ideas like a sun shield in space, or sulfur injected into the stratosphere, or give me something else please.
edit: I can't find anyone with whom to talk about this stuff. If you are able, please shoot that research down so we all sleep better.
Oh we're fucked without geoengineering at this point. Like, absolutely fucked. It's possible that if we'd started aggressively targeting CO2 emissions earlier, we wouldn't have needed to resort to borderline megaprojects, but the horse has left the barn and the republicans are still stopping us from even closing the door.
But compared to picking apart the worst of the worst case scenarios to help you sleep at night, or falling into a pit of despair and existential dread (I've done both), it's probably a better and more productive idea to start the conversation on what all geoengineering solutions are out there. It's surprising how reasonable some of them are. Best way to go I think would be to sink some money into an orbital ring, with launch prices falling the way they are, you could probably get one built for $10 or $20 billion. With something like that in place, you could transition the whole earth to solar without needing to worry about building terawatt hours worth of batteries, or the power antennae you'd need with traditional space based solar, you could just drop pretty traditional power cables to the relevant grid locations. And with the reduction of launch costs to negligible, you could also put up solar shades to start cooling the planet back down while we sequester all of the carbon we've put into the air.
Hey, I think about this shit all the time as my job requires I keep track of the future.
Things are bad. Sorry.
Always down to talk about it though.
I'm not trying to be a dick or anything, but things are really that dire. We're only now starting to see the effects of emissions from the late-70's take hold. Things are probably going to get much worse as we continue to lose the polar ice, Earth's albedo lowers, all that methane in Siberia gets loose, the oceans warm and acidify, and we get that really fun positive-feedback loop going.
If nothing is done, anybody alive by the end of the century will be living in a very unfortunate world. We've known about this problem for 200 years. Only now that we're potentially past the atmospheric-carbon point of no return are we starting to give the idea a little more credence.
Thankfully, countries are setting goals to be renewable, carbon-neutral, have electric cars, and such by about mid-century. This is great. But what happens in the 2050's wont be felt until the 2090's. We've released a lot of carbon since the 80's, and we'll realizing that fact very soon.
Personally I think there's a pretty good chance of a societal collapse once our arable land goes to dust, and the fresh water crisis drives mass migration to the more fortunate areas. Nobody is equipped to handle that.
We're researching ways to mitigate this, but anything to get us back to 1950's level atmospheric-carbon will take a worldwide economic effort. There is some hope in biotechnologies to potentially engineer quickly reproducing and rapidly growing carbon-capturing organisms and such. I've read some literature on creating new peat bogs to sequester carbon too, but that takes time. We'll want a solution that works sooner rather than later. The problem is that most potential solutions either take a lot of time, or are incredibly difficult or costly to scale.
Why not pretend that the ongoing trend towards using renewable energy will continue, and even accelerate?
It's too late, even if carbon output ceased today we're still looking at potentially catastrophic effects.
In that case, even carbon capture won't help. Anyway... I thought we were talking about your day-dreams ("I pretend"), not reality! ;)
Carbon capture would help because it would rapidly reduce the concentration of warming gasses instead of just stopping it from increasing further.
That was not quite what I was expecting. I'm not sure that trees flowering earlier is quite the same as Spring itself moving forward. It depends on what one's definition of "Spring" is. Is it an astronomical measure: the period from the vernal equinox to the summer solstice? Is it a calendrical measure: the period from 1st September to 30th November? Or is it a biological measure: the period when trees produce flowers? It seems to me that using biology to mark the seasons is a bit vague when there are trees that flower in the dead of Winter.