Carbon Cycle Feedback-Edition
ask anything about the climate here
/ccg/ - Climate Change General
Owen Wilson
Parker Turner
If
a: increased heat releases CO2 from oceans
b: increased CO2 in atmosphere increases heat
why hasn't Earth already seen a runaway process that released practically all CO2 from the oceans in a massive runaway heat blast?
Nathaniel Morales
If you reach a conclusion that is not congruent to nature either your premises/inferences were wrong or nature is wrong.
Alexander Baker
your first assumption is wrong/incomplete.
What oceanographers actually expect to happen is that atmospheric warming and its forcing on ice sheets is going to slow ocean overturning. The first effect of this is that less CO2-rich deep waters reach the surface and the ocean uptake of CO2 increases.
However, with a weaker overturning, ocean heat uptake also decreases. Both of these processes have opposite results and largely compensate each other. The combined effect is to keep the temperature (more or less) constant even after cessation of the carbon injection into the atmosphere.
Nathan Walker
When did you take the geoengineering redpill Veeky Forums? When did you start to think we should investigate geoengineering at the kilogram scale in a manner acceptable to the international community with independent oversight? When did you realize that geoengineering research is funded well enough and that more funding would in fact be detrimental?
Hunter Thomas
my personal opinion is that geoengineering is potentially even more dangerous than climate change on its own.
Take probably the most realistic approach that is suggested: injection of sulphates into the atmosphere. If we set aside for a moment the fact that this has no impact on ocean acidification, can have unexpected consequences on important climate parameters like precipitation and has to be constantly scaled up with increasing CO2 emissions - and instead just make a simple thought experiment.
Suppose that the sulphate injection abruptly stops (for a political, economic or technological reason). The sulphates will be removed from the atmosphere in the matter of months or a few years by wet and dry deposition, and the planet will assume the temperature it would otherwise have had and do it extremely rapidly.
No one can really tell you how the planet would respond to a temperature swing of that speed and magnitude because it would be without analogue in all of Earth history.
Robert Howard
What's the best way to convince your retarded friends who don't believe in anthropomorphic climate change?
Usually it goes along this kind of track, when it's brought up.
>somehow the topic is brought up in conversation
>my stance on it is obvious- something we should try to handle through smart legislation and a top-down approach, as opposed to the 'smart consumerism' that I think is unlikely to be achieved
>friend says something along the lines of the whole thing being a liberal hoax
>explain how the reported, legitimate figures of carbon emitted from factories links to rises in oceanic heat content, and particularly how it lowers the pH of the oceans
Now this is the part where I usually lose people. I explain the relationship between carbonic acid, CO2, water, and calcium carbonate (for mollusks and other fauna that rely on such for survival), and on one occasion even went so far as to demonstrate with a pH meter and blowing bubbles into water how this is in no way a made up thing. I've then had people double around after being convinced, saying such things as;
>Yeah well even if we've come so far, we can't go back. You can't remove what's already been done, and life adapts anyways.
or bringing up how it's been this bad in the past, etc., which is where I try to introduce the concept of buffers and the limitation of adaptation based on allele diversity and mutation rate, but this is where I even lose engineerfags who haven't been acquainted with biological concepts and couldn't give two shits about science in the first place.
I suppose the question is this- Even if I can explain scientifically the phenomenon of anthropomorphic climate change, and even propose that there are tangible effects cutting back on CO2 emissions would have that are beneficial for everyone, I still don't have the best odds at convincing people who are already dead set on believing it's a hoax. Do you guys have any similar situations?
Adrian Jackson
I think there is a subsection of people for which there is no hope of ever convincing them with normal, rational arguments. You could present the most comprehensive ever, with multiple independent lines of arguments and multiple sources form the referee journal literature for every one of your claims - and some people will invariably dismiss it all out of hand by making references to frivolous memes about Al Gore. Cheap laughs and easy jokes will do for them, so it's a literal waste of time to talk to them.
P.S.: the correct term is "anthropogenic", not "anthropomorphic"
Hudson Smith
oh shit I just realized I was saying anthropomorphic, I'm insanely tired. Thanks for catching that man.
Or maybe I'm doing a literary analysis-like take on the ways with which we ascribe humanistic character to the change we ourselves create within the global environment? Jokes aside, it's pretty depressing to face the futility of such issues as trying to argue for making things better before the negative effects compound. I live in WA state, and our fishing runs have taken huge hits which has a pretty gnarly ripple effect on a lot of local economies here, and one of the key reasons is that the runs have had really bad estimates because the ecosystem is undergoing so much stress it's hard to predict based on purely catch counts how big a run is going to be from year to year.
Still, the solution isn't "let's aim for bolstering a robust ecosystem that can act as a buffer for change and sustain human needs", but "fuck the lawmakers who are imposing so many fishing limits, raise the cap!". While I'm a bit more far removed from it, the issues of mining and logging in my state are also on the peripheral, and from what I understand they face very similar complicated political climates that arise from a dying industry and no obvious solution.
What's your take on how we might better those kinds of situations? Obviously you can convince people to let go of the anger that might come from learning the trade their family has been in for generations is no longer feasible, but then you get the issue of entire town economies being based on these dying trades, and the impossibility to pack up and move like it was once possible to do? The obvious solution is for the government to step in and incentivize new industries to take root, or some philanthropic (or opportunistic) company to decide to do so themselves, but that doesn't seem too common.
Asher Gutierrez
finally, we found out. climate hoax was produced by furries.
Luke Howard
>> is that geoengineering is potentially even more dangerous than climate change on its own.
we must admit this. Which is why we need international agreements in place that geoengineering only be regarded as a temporary solution.
>>sulphates
are obsolete, there are better particles to inject into the atmosphere like calcium carbonate to prevent problems with changing pH
>> the fact that this has no impact on ocean acidification
YOU JUST ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD! But it does have an impact on ocean acidification. It prevents ocean acidification by preventing carbon released by warming feedbacks.
Easton Lopez
No, no, that's anthromorphic. Anthropomorphic is to ascribe human characteristics, anthromorphic is to become like human (a la anthromorphic animals).
Robert Bailey
>current year
>still believing in the chinese hoax
Alexander Murphy
You may overturn the oceans but that is not a solution, just a delay. Or do you find otherwise?
>Irreversible climate change
That is the most click-baity title I have seen in something that attempts to pass off as a scientific publication. And a few lines into the abstract they back pedal and add "for 1,000 years". Really. That is a shooting offence.
Aiden Thompson
>Which is why we need international agreements in place
Worthless, just like the "peace in our time". People sign one thing and do something else. They will not hesitate to lie if they are confronted with facts. Every time.
bbc.com
>Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy.
>However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.
>The Italian environment agency told the BBC its inventory was correct and complied with UN regulations and it did not accept the Swiss figures.
See? That is all it takes to sign these agreements.
Thomas Flores
But they are actually good launching points for individual countries to motivate wholesale change in industry. China is making an incredibly quick pivot on their emissions, and is investing a lot of money into their clean energy industries so as to compensate. For them, high emissions, high-consumption oil and coal was just a temporary measure to modernize quickly, a feat which they have accomplished and are now promptly moving on to sustainability- something every government should pay heed to doing.
International agreements aren't worthless. They don't cut it and they aren't solutions, but they are still important for sociocultural change, and trying to set standards. Ultimately, the standards can't be enforced realistically- but the goal isn't to necessarily create global legislation, but rather encourage countries to introduce laws that preserve the commons. The more superpowers that are on board, the more legal action and enforcability these laws can have (see: WTO and the ability larger countries have to sue smaller ones based on WTO infractions).
It's a leap of faith, but this is one of the only options, and probably the most feasible, to tackling the dilemma of the tragedy of the commons.
Lincoln Gutierrez
>geoengineering
babby lern'd a new werd
William Gonzalez
>But they are actually good launching points for individual countries to motivate wholesale change in industry.
That is still naive. It is just a good launching point to pay for more CO2 quota money that goes to China, one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
>China is making an incredibly quick pivot on their emissions
Clearly you did not read the article. China is censoring the emission statistics. Please at least read what I linked to.
>and is investing a lot of money into their clean energy industries
They will HAVE to say that in order to still receive CO2 quota money.
>For them, high emissions, high-consumption oil and coal was just a temporary measure to modernize quickly
The air in Beijing is still horrible.
>they are still important for sociocultural change
Again, this is just naive.
>It's a leap of faith
...into an abyss of their own making.
>but this is one of the only options, and probably the most feasible, to tackling the dilemma of the tragedy of the commons
With all the active measures against geoengineering one should not be surprised that options are limited.
Personally I believe putting more money into R&D for energy, batteries, solar cell tech will have more impact than shovelling billions into corrupt states.
Hudson Morris
We're moving a little too far from climate than I like with this, so I wont say too much.
My basic opinion is this: With the current economy, it's really expected from us that we make monetary wealth the measure of all things and acquiring everything within our immediate grasp the goal of life, but I don't think that this is how humans function at all. I think deep down the vast majority of people do like to help each other and they care about the environment and the health of the planet. In fact, even U.S. public opinion (which is often off-the-spectrum on many issues) is close to world opinion on this.
I think it's a fundamentally institutional problem. Rex Tillerson for example could be completely aware that the phenomenon is very dangerous and that everything he owns will be destroyed if it's allowed to continue - but he can't do anything about it. If you're the CEO of ExxonMobil, you have to maximize the use of fossil fuels, otherwise you're out. I submit that the problem will never be fully solved until this kind of irrationality is eliminated.
John Brooks
I guess you got me there. Sulphate injection only has a *minor* impact on ocean acidification.
Robert Lopez
Because there are other factors that can affect the climate and CO2 alone has a logarithmic warming effect. The reason interglacial warming was rapid was because of this feedback loop spurred by increased solar forcing. The reason it stopped was because the solar forcing decreased, leading to a slow reversal of the feedback loop. So there is no contradicting, you're just missing information.
Grayson Thompson
How long before the Siberian frosts sublimate
Logan Flores
>China is making an incredibly quick pivot on their emissions,
cause they were literally chocking on their own smog , no outside force guilt tripped them.
Landon Clark
>What's the best way to convince your retarded friends who don't believe in anthropomorphic climate change?
You don't, they're brainlets and should be sent to the gulag.
Nolan Foster
How much does the rabbi pay you to make this same shit thread every day and therefore killing a more constructive intellectual thread every day with the same thread anew? If its good pay I might do it too
Landon Myers
When will new york flood?
Thomas Russell
Is a methane clathrate feedback loop likely? What will happen to surface life?
Jackson Baker
>le global Jew conspiracy
Just get the fuck out of my board, this shit is so tired. It's not funny anymore you dumb fuck
Jacob Reed
Causes
+ Internal forcing mechanisms
- Ocean-atmosphere variability
- Life
+ External forcing mechanisms
- Orbital variations
- Solar output
- Volcanism
- Plate tectonics
- Human influences
Of the causes of climate change, what % of it is Human Influences?
Matthew Robinson
>>/x/
Evan Martinez
>for the last 500 million years earth has cycled its climate back and forth, 80% of the time being completely devoid of polar glacials
>morons think humans have any capacity to avoid that
Elijah Taylor
Geologist here. Geoengineering is not a good solution because it has unintended potentially disastrous consequences.
Take one example. Iron seeding of the ocean. We KNOW it would reverse climate change. It's also relatively inexpensive. What's the consequence of dumping that much raw iron into the ocean? What's the consequence of all that rust on the ocean floor? What's the consequence to the food web?
We can't answer those questions. Doing anything to reverse climate change could be worse than climate change. The best solution is to stop burning fossil fuels.
Charles Collins
Your question is loaded.
Right now solar output is lessening which means we should be cooling right now. We're not cooling right now. So we could say 100% of climate change is human influenced.
Just looking at what percentage of the total temperature of the Earth is due to different factors does nothing to explain how humans can and are changing the climate negatively.
Jonathan Williams
It's conceivable that it played a substantial role during individual events in Earth history (PETM, P-T boundary, etc.) but there is no reason to suppose the apocalyptic release that you sometimes hear about on the internet.
The physical and chemical sinks in the ocean strongly limit the amount of carbon that would reach the ocean-atmosphere interface.
Also, the Pleistocene and Pliocene features several moments where temperatures as warm or warmer than today were sustained for thousands of years and -needless to say- they aren't characterized by an apocalyptic methane release.
Eli Nguyen
This argument is so stupid and it also makes me pretty angry.
The switches between glaciated icehouse to ice-free greenhouse conditions were processes that took millions of years in the past and were modulated by tectonics (i.e. the fragmentation or formation of supercontinents) and the large changes in CO2 concentration that went with them. For example, the change from peak-Cenozoic conditions to ice sheets on both hemisphere took something 47 million years.
You're welcome to believe that natural variation of climate was just about to undo all that in a few centuries (starting at the same time as human emissions of GHGs accelerate, by wild coincidence I'm sure), but that has absolutely nothing to do with the real world.
Gavin Gutierrez
Mfw somebody in 2018 - 1/12 believes in “Climate Change”
Jeremiah Garcia
16 of the 17 warmest years (global average)
have occurred after 2001.
Nathaniel Lee
Fuck man. I knew the world trade center was cooling this world.
Connor Smith
>global temparature isn't cyclical
Jeremiah Foster
They don't backpedal squat though, how is 'irreversible for a thousand years' in any way a difficult concept to grasp?
Bentley Green
Can someone comment on this graph? Why did IPCC uses CO2 residence time that is order of magnitude higher than reported by dozen other studies.
Google reverse image search found that the graph has sketchy origin from denier site, but the content seems legit
Liam Brooks
they're comparing two different things and are shocked to find they're different
the residence time in the atmosphere of a single CO2 molecule is about 5-10 years. but the EFFECT of CO2 emissions can easily last a century.
if the oceans and the atmosphere exchange two molecules of CO2 (as they often do) that molecule's residence time in the atmosphere has ended, but the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn't changed. it may not be the exact same molecule, but...
explained well here:
>skepticalscience.com