Neb on 13/8/2012 at 13:44
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
It's a bit like the thing with Glaciers. It won't take us long at this rate to heat the planet up enough to cause the melt, but it's still going to take a 1000 years or so to do the actual melting.
Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find a way to get there quicker.
Inline Image:
http://i1066.photobucket.com/albums/u405/neb23/tmp.png?t=1344865299 -
Earth surface temperature given steady 2.3% energy growth, assuming some source other than sunlight is employed to provide our energy needs and that its use transpires on the surface of the planet. Even a dream source like fusion makes for unbearable conditions in a few hundred years if growth continues. Note that the vertical scale is logarithmic.(
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/)
scumble on 13/8/2012 at 14:05
I think some natural limiting system would come into effect before Earth gets to be like Venus. Hopefully.
Sometimes the Gaia hypothesis is quite attractive. She's been around for 4 billion years so might have something up her sleeve.
Incidentally I can't resist linking to this again:
[video=youtube;3YlNCBliw20]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YlNCBliw20[/video]
jay pettitt on 13/8/2012 at 14:22
Quote Posted by faetal
1) [citation needed]
1) [(
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011JC007218.shtml) citation provided]
"A significant degradation of subsea permafrost is expected to be detectable at the beginning of the next millennium."2) Projected. Temps are not the only fruit. There's still a lot of permafrost to thaw whether you do that at 4C, 5C or 6C.
3) Absolutely.
--edit--
I think the argument Carlin is slam poeting there is unsupportable with logic, reason, economics or science and is ethically/morally repugnant and completely indefensible - other than as an exercise in free speech. It's entertaining, but that doesn't stop it from also being weapons grade bollocks. While it's literally true that we are specs on a not particularly big rock, I absolutely think we should take a selfish interest in how we fare on it.
I suppose by pop culture repost, esquire magazine just hit the nail on the head.
Quote:
In Canada, I learned that my entire approach to life is wrong. I tend to trust and believe in the responsible people who are fair-minded and try to see both sides of an issue. I disdain the Not-In-My-Backyard approach of people who only care about their own petty personal issues regardless of the larger good, and I harbored (from lots of reading and zero personal experience) a special secret disdain for Native Americans and First Canadians who try to stop oil trucks to defend some vanished Eden that ain't never coming back. I thought we should soberly consider all the facts — like the global need for oil to warm our houses, to drive to work — and find a reasonable balance.
I was wrong. Global warming turns all those assumptions on their heads. I thought about it throughout my reporting for "Keystone" — which I've been reflecting on all week here and which is now available online in full — from Fort McMurray in Alberta, where the pipeline begins and cannot be stopped, to Port Arthur, Texas, where the oilmen tell you the opposite of the scientists. And, turns out, the crazy people are the sane ones, and the sober, reasonable, responsible people are probably going to be the ones to destroy the world. If that's not the fking bitterest joke of all time, I don't know what is: The Great Destroyer isn't Hitler or Stalin or Mao; it's the Canadians — and all the sober little Canadians within us.
faetal on 13/8/2012 at 14:25
Quote Posted by scumble
Sometimes the Gaia hypothesis is quite attractive. She's been around for 4 billion years so might have something up her sleeve.
I don't think anyone is suggesting the planet is at risk, the planet will be just fine. Just like it was after the Permian mass extinction eradicated around 90% of all life on earth.
faetal on 13/8/2012 at 14:39
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
1) citation provided
"A significant degradation of subsea permafrost is expected to be detectable at the beginning of the next millennium."
"From 1985 to 2100, we impose a linear trend in summer BLTs of 0.09°C/yr, equal to the modern warming trend observed from 1985 to 2009 (see section 3.1 for more details). Afterward, we keep the BLT constant (11.5°C) until the year 3000."
Indicates that the 1,000 years is based on nothing intervening to cause the rate of climate change to increase, which is a bit blinkered, albeit useful for this model. Just not what I'd call a smoking gun for methane hydrate release not being a worry in the next 1000 years.
Quote:
2) Projected. Temps are not the only fruit. There's still a lot of permafrost to thaw whether you do that at 4C, 5C or 6C.
And the rate at which it thaws is going to be a function of the rate of climate change, non?
jay pettitt on 13/8/2012 at 17:33
I didn't say temps weren't a fruit. I said they weren't the only fruit.
Stop being a verbose douche, we don't actually need to stage a debate around the relationship between work, energy and time. It's Junior school stuff.
If we manage warm the world quickly enough to make a massive methane release happen imminently we probably don't need to worry so much about the methane.
faetal on 13/8/2012 at 18:18
I'm just taking issue with the "quickly enough" part. We'll miss it for sure, but we don't really want our great, great, great x whatever grand-children lumped with it as an inevitability because of runaway positive feedback processes do we? The methane clathrate time bomb is the sucker punch, but there are a multitude of other factors which are gradually taking away human ability to ameliorate the processes which get us there.
Vivian on 13/8/2012 at 18:47
It's been a long time since I was a geologist, but isn't one of the issues with clathrates that they are unstable, anyway? You've got a lot of gas trapped in ice-crystals that doesn't necessarily need to be melted to release it, just sufficiently unloaded to break under the strain. So once some critical amount of weight above it is released, by I dunno, ice not being there or something, then boom - clathrate deposit goes catastrophic, HUGE fucking methane outgas all at once. Is that right? I remember my lecturer saying it would be fast and large enough to sink a ship above it by displacing most of the water under it.
jay pettitt on 13/8/2012 at 19:23
That's pretty much it [Vivian], but the permafrost is thick. It's going to take a while to get down to the worst of it.
But yeah, the ball is rolling. An Arctic albedo feedback won't help.
I know it doesn't seem like it now because with politics the way they are the US couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery - but I'd be damn surprised if we don't do something to minimise emissions and then geo-engineer the rest long before anyone actually sees methane in epoch changing quantities - simply because there are far more immediate costs associated with not addressing climate change.
The IPCC narrative is that > +2C is dangerous. Most economic models put the figure where climate change starts becoming costly if not actually dangerous at more like 1.2C
If (and it's a big if, but maybe they are) the sorts of extremes in weather that we've seen in recent years are climate change come early so to speak then the economic models are wrong.
