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[wierd]

we barely got the paris climate pact forged, and it is already threatened.

it will take more than 4 years to scrub the atmosphere, and in that time the economies of the world would implode from the absurd costs of the project. people would abandon it to afford to eat.

when I say economics makes me angry, i have no words powerful enough to express my rage.

[MrRoboto75]

aggressive atmospheric scrubbing and sequestration in a geologically stable form might avert or mitigate the disaster if we did it on a truly colossal scale, but the economin costs would bankrupt the planet.

The earth being ded would also bankrupt the planet

[wierd]

humans are really good at ignoring or working around problems and considering them fixed.
the earth would no longer have a normal biosphere, but humans would have ocean habitats, and domed cities, with nuclear powered reactors processing air and water.

[Max™]

Well, I'm a bit worried about the temperatures up there too. See, a warmer radiator (-2.7 C) is more  (-6.5 C) effective (-11.7 C) at losing (-20.6 C) heat (-27.2 C), and since we know where it went (space) you start to wonder where it came from. Since it isn't there now (-28.1 C), and the Sun set a while back that far north, it has to be transported from somewhere further south.

Things aren't looking too unusual compared to last year (-20.1 C) or the year before (-31.8 C), but nearly a megasec ago (-2.7 C) it was around 28 C warmer than the same time last year (-31.3 C), though the nullschool site doesn't go back before 11/24/2014 sadly.

Still the main idea here is that this wasn't a gradual process of the Arctic being warmed by +20 C, it was a freakishly warm spike this year, so we don't have a lot of precedent to go by on there.

its a tipping point issue. once temperatures rise enough to begin destablizing deposits, the contributions of the added gasses make destablization of deeper deposits happen, in a runaway reaction. that is exactly what is happening.

Tipping points are the worst fad science buzzword ever.

The planet remains within a certain temperature range over megayears, the hottest periods and the coldest periods didn't turn into permanent runaway scenarios, outside of the snowball earth periods, and the current geological period has been defined by an ice age cycle. Brief spikes to warm periods like our civilization arose within, then long slides into glaciation.

One might say the global climate exhibits a damping behavior and a tendency to return to, and oscillate around certain states. These are properties usually associated with systems involving significant negative feedbacks. This is a problem for any hypothesis proposing it is controlled by positive feedback effects, especially high gain ones.

yess... if there wasnt already epic fucktons of the stuff wrapping the planet like a blanket, which there is.

on the ocean floor, its fine.  when the heat cant escape the planet, because of the amount already in the atmosphere, then any source of heat will drive more forcing.

You're talking about 44 Terawatts from the ground vs 173 Petawatts (or 173,000 Terawatts) from the Sun.

Hadn't heard about the seaweed thing for cows.

I wonder what the state of the clathrate was during the late Paleozoic (Carboniferous, Permian) and most of the Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic periods. The Cretaceous got cooler on average), those were pretty warm periods. Warmer than now that's for sure.

i would have to research it more carefully, but my armchair opinion is the driving greegouse gasses were co2 and water, and that clathrate ices were not being produced/stored up like we have now, as the carbon was inside organisms, or being deposited in what are now our oil fields.

methane is 36 times more powerful than co2.  different atmosphere, different equilibrium.

Clathrates have formed as long as there was methane and suitably cool boundaries between oceans and rocks, so basically as long as bacteria have been farting and burping, or the entire span of life on the planet, possibly excluding the anoxic period during the Permian-Triassic extinction, and bits in the snowball periods where the behavior of methane released subsurface may not have been the same as it is today with a broad ocean/atmosphere interface.

[MrRoboto75]

humans are really good at ignoring or working around problems and considering them fixed.
the earth would no longer have a normal biosphere, but humans would have ocean habitats, and domed cities, with nuclear powered reactors processing air and water.

Literal sci-fi, with massive innovation in structural technology, agriculture, and nuclear power: Absolutely going to happen

Innovation in the energy industry that makes green energy cheaper/better: literally impossible

[Max™]

Huh, I was curious about the story mentioning the Pole getting above freezing last December, I remember that happening so I went and checked it out.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That was a hell of a day.

[smjjames]

Tropical storm remnant? You'd have to backtrack it and find the storm if it was one.

Wait, isn't that also when the polar vortex dropped south? I remember something about the polar vortex slipping south earlier this year, or maybe that was the winter before, we may be in for another one.

[PTTG??]

aggressive atmospheric scrubbing and sequestration in a geologically stable form might avert or mitigate the disaster if we did it on a truly colossal scale, but the economin costs would bankrupt the planet.

Not actually true. My estimate (using desert solar power and amines) puts it at an apollo-scale effort. Maybe two. Not nearly enough to bankrupt the planet. And it produces infrastructure useful for maintaining the desired level.

Also, atmospheric methane has a half-life of seven years, as opposed to (quick search) 22 years for CO2. Not great, and definitely a problem when the gun fires, but less permanent than the CO2 by a significant margin.

Back to genuine politics instead of geoscience:

http://farai.com/the-call-to-whiteness/ An interesting and moving article that clearly and precisely indicts the alt-right and this new white movement. Not to paraphrase the article, but rather to prime the reader, I ask: Must everyone with an identity answer for the excesses of the few? What if that few work for what they see as the best interest of the identity?

[LoSboccacc]

I was wondering after this election, for how a representative democracy works, if your electoral base is 1/4 racist bigots, you ought to get 1/4 racist bigots in parliament.

Maybe that doesn't seems so bad, because they would not have the majority and thus an healthy debate with them being shunned at every corner would happen often, hopefully shifting the public opinion.

But what would happen where them to gain the critical mass necessary to govern a country by whims of statistical fluctuations on constituencies?

Or to the extreme: if a sovereign state is composed 100% by racists, would their parliament be wrong or right being racist? This may be a clear cut case, because of the stigma that comes with the term. But pick something a little less clear cut like same sex adoptions and see.

Point is while moral and ethics are two words for a reason, a country is not exclusive property of the intellectual elite, as much as we want it to be. Those should be more concerned in educating if they want to be an agent for change, instead of playing politics. And for a while the education system worked, but since it has been politicized it's going downhill again, with the social media peer pressure echo chambers dragging the masses into radicalization.

[PTTG??]

LoSboccacc ,are we supposed to provide political education or not?

[Phmcw]

Political showerthought, the huge predicted slowdown in the economy caused by trade tariff may end up doing a lot for the environment by reducing drastically CO2 emission.
 

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You jest, but as I recall there was a CO2 falloff after the 2008 crash. Though something a lot of people forget is that CO2 is not the only significant greenhouse gas, methane and NOx are also contributors. Methane even has the potential to be worse, though it is not currently released in sufficient quantities to outweigh CO2. NOx is mostly released by concrete curing.

[Reelya]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-cow-farting-1.3856202
Basically a farmer was feeding seaweed to his cows to save money. A researcher started looking at it, and found that the methane farts were down 20% in the seaweed-eating cows. He tested a whole bunch of different seaweeds, and they have one now that eliminates 99%+ of cow farts. Cow farts account for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and considering it's almost all methane, it's probably a bigger percentage of the effect than 20% (depending on how they factored that).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's not really the major source of the problem, and I almost think the media focuses on it so much because of how ridiculous it sounds. The true vast amounts of methane are released by:

1. "Anaerobic lagoons" a.k.a pools of liquid animal shit resulting from factory farms.

2. Permafrost melt.

I'm not sure if mass dieoffs also produce significant amounts of methane, but I wouldn't bet against it. The even further messed up part about the pools of liquid animal shit is that we could totally seal and burn that methane for electric power even if we didn't want to stop making them, but instead just let it enter the atmosphere because of how obviously obscene it is and how hard livestock companies try to hide their existence.

Like, it's great they can reduce rumination and all, but the public opinion damage it does is widespread and companies probably won't adopt it unless they're forced to.

[martinuzz]

Is there an article on that in nature, or some other peer reviewed science magazine? If not, I'll just consider this another bullshit (pun intended) article.