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Grouchio posted:One has to note though that in India solar power is now cheaper than coal, and that as a result we can expect India to no longer build new coal plants after this year. And while China has contributed significantly to emissions they are currently set to peak their emissions around 2020/21, before renewables overtake Coal there and begin decreasing emissions. India currently plans on replacing much of its coal fired power plants with more coal fired power plants in the late 2020s, around the time when non-renewable generation needs to be at 0. They currently use coal for three quarters of their total electricity generation, and while the fraction may decrease, the raw utilization is not expected to significantly change as India's middle class grows and increases consumption. You're also only considering generation costs, not storage costs. Solar has a bad problem in this domain: The Duck Curve. India will continue to miss IPCC and SR15 targets for 2C for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure how this "buys us more time" as you put it.
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Nov 18, 2018 00:43
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Grouchio posted:That's not what I've been hearing: https://www.powermag.com/indias-coal-glut-leaves-producers-teetering-on-bankruptcy/?pagenum=1 That article indicates that coal production rates in terms of watts generated is still increasing and is still projected to increases in the 2020s, as I said: quote:But capacity growth appears to have changed unevenly by the massive build-out of coal-fired power plants. Since 2012, India has added a total of 85 GW of new coal capacity—far exceeding targets set out in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012–2017) for 69 GW of coal and 520 MW of lignite. During that time, it also added 5 GW of hydro, 7 GW of gas, and 2 GW of nuclear capacity. As of March 2018, according to the Ministry of Power, the country had 343 GW of total installed capacity, 57.3% of which was coal-fired; 7.2%, gas-fired; 0.2%, oil-fired; 13.2% hydro; 2%, nuclear; and 20.1% renewables, including wind and solar. The most optimistic scenario would be a 6.4 - 22GW total reduction. The pessimistic projection based on projected capacity would be a 47.9 - 6.4GW increase. Both sides of this will fail to meet 2C targets. The projected decommissioning rates are a pittance compared to the 85 GW of capacity installed since 2012.
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Nov 18, 2018 01:08
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Grouchio posted:So you're saying my optimism was misplaced when I heard that solar was cheaper than coal last may in India and foolish for thinking that it would dis-incentivize India from becoming a heavy coal economy in the long-term because Nah just that India will almost certainly still be building more coal plants in the future and solar isn't a panacea especially when storage is still such a problem.
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Nov 18, 2018 03:53
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punk rebel ecks posted:So how bad is poo poo going to get in say fifty years? I'm imaging the current migration crisis in Europe x10 and food prices doubling worldwide. Here are some things we can expect to happen with medium to high confidence if we continue along a business as usual emissions pathway for the next 50 years: By 2050 large portions of the tropics will see 100 year flood events happen every other year. By the mid 2030s carbonate undersaturation events will result in the food web dying from the ground up seasonally along sections of the southern ocean, which will worsen and spread every year. By mid century snowpack runoff from midlatitude mountains quits happening in spring and pushes into late winter further and further resulting in heavier flooding followed by summer drought and an inability to use these water sources for crops in mid spring. Extreme drought events like Cape Town increase by an order of magnitude. Extreme fire weather like the Camp Fire increases by an order of magnitude. Extreme precipitation events like tropical storm Harvey increase by an order of magnitude with around a 5:1 ratio of people losing access to wastewater services compared to those that flood. The Arctic will be seasonally ice free with the remaining cold reservoir in Greenland and in the portion of the North Atlantic to the South of Greenland creating strong windstorms into coastal Europe. We don't know how much worse insect and phytoplankton losses will continue to get, but they're already dying in bulk. I would put your estimate in the "extremely optimistic" camp. Notorious R.I.M. fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 06:10
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Morbus posted:OK this is a dumb question and a bit of a tangent but, you mention the phytoplankton die off, and I've read that paper saying that it's declined 40% or something since 1950, due to CO2 increases in the atmosphere/ocean. Phytoplankton are among some of the oldest eukaryotic life, and many or most modern phytoplankton species emerged and became dominant in the Mesozoic during a greenhouse climate both warmer and with higher CO2 concentrations than anywhere we are headed. So, why are modern phytoplankton apparently so sensitive to the relatively modest increase in ocean CO2 at present? Carbonate saturation is affected by pH which is not just a function of pCO2 in the ocean. You also need to know the total charge balance of the seawater, i.e. the total alkalinity (TA). We have historic CO2 injection loading events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thernal Maximum, however the TA reaponse of the seawater was much different. This is conjectured to be due to an enhanced sedimentary weathering effect which adds alkalinity and dissolved carbon to the ocean. The current net CO2 injection rate in tandem with the lower TA of the oceans ultimately means we're in a unique situation that has no true analog in the paleoclimate record. For a brief review of carbonate chemistry that describes the carbonate cycle in detail, I recommend History of Seawater Carbonate Chemistry, Atmospheric CO2, and Ocean Acidification: https://courses.pbsci.ucsc.edu/eeb/bioe159/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Zeebe-et-al.-2012.pdf For a recent review of PETM emission and sequestration scenarios contrasted with current anthropogenic acidification rates, I recommend New Constraints on Massive Carbon Release and Recovery Processes During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae285/pdf . This paper discusses the enhanced sedimentary weathering effect in detail. Here is a section of the conclusion that directly answers your question: quote:The onset of the PETM involved the release of a mass of carbon similar to that projected for 'business as usual' anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions (Parry et al 2007), but distributed over a duration an order of magnitude longer (figure 9). This slower rate allowed for CO2 to be mixed into the deep ocean as it was released, instead of remaining concentrated in the atmosphere and surface ocean, as is anticipated to occur on the short term in response to comparatively more rapid and short-lived anthropogenic emissions. This spared Earth's surface from extremely high temperatures resulting from a short-lived peak in pCO2, and spared the surface ocean from a rapid and severe decline in pH and Ω (carbonate saturation state) on similarly short timescales (Zeebe and Zachos 2013). There are of course non-calcifying phytoplankton, but the net result is that we're rapidly shocking the trophic balance of a very basic community. We will see rapid adaptation, extinction, and a lot of variance due to unique carbonate cycle pressures. Notorious R.I.M. fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 09:51
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All this being said we do have diatoms and they rapidly grew following the end-Permian. I have some optimism that they were nature's immune response to GHG injections in the past, and they'll help balance ocean chemistry moving forward.
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Nov 18, 2018 10:10
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StabbinHobo posted:just on a meta level, the mods unwillingness to ban owl is a sortof microcosm of why its so hard to make progress. the endless debating of stupid poo poo is an incredibly powerful tactic for reactionaries to undermine progress, the cia even wrote a handbook about it. if we as a community have no immune system response to his behavior, we will forever be limited by the time and energy it takes to metabolize his poison. Can we kick this new thread off the right way and ban OOCC if he ever posts in it again. Will trade 10 Thug Lessons for 1 OOCC
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Nov 19, 2018 23:19
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It won't take long before littering gets you decked as hard as dropping n bombs tbh.
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Dec 1, 2018 20:04
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Lampsacus posted:Its funny because I'm moving towards med. school. (albeit in my own way ) and more and more of my decision is being painted with climate change. By the time I graduate the whole environment will be noticeably different. I'm wondering how much of my personal statement should include references to c. breakdown. Coverage chills out in winter when less things are on fire or inundated. Thankfully you can always check the other hemisphere.
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Dec 4, 2018 08:19
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Mozi posted:There would be a reasonable argument for geoengineering to more gradually bring down the level of aerosols in that instance I would imagine. lol
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Dec 8, 2018 15:59
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Current estimates for the aerosol dimming effect are about 0.8c (NCAR 2018 ch. 2) and reaches steady state in weeks after emissions are stopped. If all emissions stopped tomorrow we'd be over 1.5c. Continuing to spray sulfates into the air is a loving terrible idea; pollution is bad for us. And I have to harp on this over and over because people only consider temperature: sulfate dimming does gently caress all to stop ocean acidification.
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Dec 8, 2018 16:06
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Rime posted:Strap yo'selves in for a gooder, friendos. Pliocene to eocene in one generation is just astonishing lmao.
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Dec 11, 2018 03:34
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StabbinHobo posted:i've been thinking about this cut up 1sqmi blocks of land and transport them north 2 degrees every ten years obviously.
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Dec 11, 2018 06:12
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IMO the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways do a better job of demonstrating possible emission and societal response pathways from here. SSP3 and SSP4 both provide better pessimistic examples than the silly spew-coal-forever RCP 8.5 world.
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Dec 12, 2018 07:56
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colonialism, except without crops or fish this time
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Dec 24, 2018 02:26
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anyone know if the source research for the Newfoundland plankton biomass research is out? Didn't see it in the article or a quick search
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Dec 24, 2018 02:29
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vas0line posted:I’m a computer toucher working for gigantic soulless corporation in the US. What are some companies I can apply to that are actively working to come up with solutions to CC? The best thing to do in the computer touching industry is make everyone work remote.
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Dec 25, 2018 22:51
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funkatron3000 posted:I asked a few pages back about legit carbon offsets / sequestering / etc but got nada. I'm just curious what other people are voluntarily doing to offset their footprint past reducing? Even if you drive an EV, if your power is from natural gas you're still up the creek. I found companies offering "offsets", but the price seems to good to be true... then there's people working on sequestering carbon, but it's "not economically viable" yet. Viable or not, is there a legit price point to remove X tons of CO2 or is that just really not a thing yet? carbon offset credits are horseshit
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Dec 26, 2018 22:25
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funkatron3000 posted:False, but you keep building up those straw men. What the gently caress are you on about with "russia/oil shills"? Carbon offset credits are nothing but a way for you to feel better about yourself. If you want to reduce CO2 then advocate for policy change and change your lifestyle.
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Dec 27, 2018 18:12
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funkatron3000 posted:I was mostly joking, but when someone asks a simple question about what we can do in addition personal lifestyle changes to reduce our footprint to sequester CO2 because offsets look like a scam, like buy 20 acres of forest or growing algae or whatever sucks up CO2, and the response is you can't and also asking the question means you're pro every other environmental problem, it makes you think that poster isn't replying in good faith. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170518104038.htm quote:Growing plants and then storing the carbon dioxide they have taken up from the atmosphere is no viable option to counteract unmitigated emissions from fossil fuel burning, a new study shows. The plantations would need to be so large, they would eliminate most natural ecosystems or reduce food production if implemented as a late-regret option in the case of substantial failure to reduce emissions. No we're just tired of fools like you thinking that you can offset your waste when no such technology exists at the scale we need. Oh, and we have twelve years to halve emissions. Thinking that you can just cancel out your waste on a gigantic planetary system is the same kind of hubris that got us into this mess. Everything is a cycle. If you make big loving algae blooms they have to go somewhere. All that respiration leads to anoxia in the deep ocean. More unexpected changes. The cycle out of balance continues. The best way to mitigate is to reduce variance. Mitigating one extreme carbon cycle imbalance with another extreme does not accomplish that.
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Dec 27, 2018 22:38
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Can someone reiterate for me why carbon sequestration is a necessity rather than one of many possible climate change solutions? That is, I recall that bringing emissions to 0% would not be sufficient to stop global warming, but I don't recall the mechanism making that the case (besides the obvious things like 1.5C or 2C being themselves too costly/damaging. I'm thinking along the lines not of the impacts we have now continuing but rather that temperatures would continue to rise even in a zero-emission world). Maintaining a temperature of 1.5C by 2100 requires a brief overshoot in the 2nd half of the 21st century that is then lowered via negative emissions. Essentially, we've waited long enough that realistic emissions pathways can't practically reduce to zero quickly enough, so we have to go negative.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:27
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enki42 posted:I've already said that I don't necessarily thing things are "solved", but absolutely 100% they are not as bad as they were expected to be. In a lot of cases that's due to efforts to combat them, but it's absolutely false to say that things are as bad as the media perception of them was in the 90's. Extinction rates across the board are high and even insect biomass is plummeting from rainforests. "There is a absolutely a perception that [everything] is less of a problem than it was in the 90s" by whom? People like you that don't bother keeping up with current literature? Your average person will notice about the time that the groundwater aquifers and snowpack runoff they depend on for food start to dry up and prices skyrocket. You can thank the green revolution for insulating us from reality.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:37
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Trainee PornStar posted:If we actually had our collective poo poo together I think we'd scrape through climate change. You're wrong. Having our poo poo together still won't let us build a time machine.
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Jan 8, 2019 21:13
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Accretionist posted:Big article with lots of info, analysis. Glad the obvious important message is near the top quote:Consumption of ruminant meat (beef, lamb and goat) is projected to rise 88 percent between 2010 and 2050. Beef, the most commonly consumed ruminant meat, is resource-intensive to produce, requiring 20 times more land and emitting 20 times more GHGs per gram of edible protein than common plant proteins, such as beans, peas and lentils. Limiting ruminant meat consumption to 52 calories per person per day by 2050—about 1.5 hamburgers per week—would reduce the GHG mitigation gap by half and nearly close the land gap. In North America this would require reducing current beef and lamb consumption by nearly half. Actions to take include improving the marketing of plant-based foods, improving meat substitutes and implementing policies that favor consumption of plant-based foods. I don't give a poo poo about vegetarianism or whether you think individual action matters, drastically reducing the amount of ruminant meat you consume is piss easy to do and has gigantic land use impacts. Cutting out ruminant consumption on a societal scale would make so many other land use problems non-issues The parts about moving from wild fishing to aquaculture are interesting as well, especially since the authors have a fairly rosy projection of wild fish stock in the future.
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Jan 13, 2019 21:04
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enki42 posted:Wouldn't this be a good argument for carbon taxes / tariffs on countries that don't have carbon taxes? It's unrealistic that consumers are just going to decide en masse to make better choices, especially when those choices can't be wrapped in a handmade bespoke bow from a farmer's market, so force the issue and just make everything that's carbon intensive to produce way more expensive than the things that are produced more sustainably. Land use problems are just as much about the nitrogen and phosphate cycles as they are about the carbon cycle. And the market solution is really simple: Make ruminant products cost 100x as much. Done.
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Jan 14, 2019 21:20
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Insanite posted:How many cows do you have to save to counteract this? You just sit back and enjoy the canaries of a pliocene transition. That's baked in!
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Jan 14, 2019 22:19
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Insanite posted:Nah, it's cool. I have 100% renewable electricity, will make my next car electric, and haven't eaten a cow in years. Proud of you for helping slow things down at pliocene level instead of miocene or eocene.
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Jan 14, 2019 22:34
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Insanite posted:If you buy wholesale into impending climate death and don't believe that enough can or will be done about it, trying not to be homeless or drowned in late-middle-age feels like an okay thing to consider (yo). I think most people in their 20s and 30s are thinking about adaptation in the wrong way. Non liquid assets are just a ball and chain. Get rid of all of them that aren't necessities. Get away from the coast. Get in shape. Learn first aid. Learn your local biome. Invest in your local community and get active in public works so you have a network of like minded people. Use Cape Town and the long incoming list of drought and famine events as case studies to research adaptation. Most people don't really have a good understanding of how things will get worse on a decadal time scale. Resilient communities will come out fine. Many unprepared people who otherwise enjoyed a good standard of living will be unprepared and immiserated.
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Jan 15, 2019 21:45
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DrSunshine posted:Is FI/RE a bad idea or a good idea given the realities? I think it's more important to have as much liquid assets as possible to keep your options open for when you need it. The "FIRE" types mostly seem like self indulgent shitheads that want to be able to spend more time curating their Instagram accounts and revelling in the ennui that their life of privilege has afforded them while operating under the assumption that their 2018 portfolio growth will carry on in perpetuity. If you're in a spot to let your income carry you for 20-30 years and you'd rather just do social services though, by all means go for it imo. Regardless there's always a lot of variance in outcomes. Maybe we get AOC 2024 and actually hit the SR15 targets by 2030. Assuming that currency will be meaningless by X date ignores the full distribution of outcomes.
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Jan 15, 2019 22:14
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Grouchio posted:Jesus loving christ people I thought we weren't supposed to doomsay in here. Expecting transient or permanent failures of our JIT logistics to supply food or water as early as the 2030s isn't doomsaying. Not sure what else you're tilting at windmills about this time. Also when you talk about water budgets of inland freshwater lakes you also need to consider things like evapotranspiration and precipitation rates. iirc most of the great lakes are expected to decrease in volume under a BAU regime. Aggressive changes in either direction are harder to adapt to.
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Jan 16, 2019 01:29
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Infinite Karma posted:Let's genetically engineer some super-algae to seed in the global oceans that can fix even more carbon than normal phytoplankton. Make them toxic to normal microscopic predators, too, so they really multiply. Whatever damage they cause couldn't be that bad, right? Not compared to the alternative. this is exactly how you get euxinia and fatal amounts of hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere
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Jan 16, 2019 02:04
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Infinite Karma posted:It's the opposite, euxinia and H2S are the result of anoxia and too much CO2 (and decomposing organisms). Phytoplankton are photosynthetic, and produce oxygen. Euxinia requires a stratified ocean with an oxic surface layer and an anoxic deep ocean layer. Having a productive surface layer where phytoplankton are not eaten but instead rain into the deep ocean increases aerobic respiration via the equilibrium reaction 2CH2O + 2O2 <=> 2CO2 + 2H2O until oxygen supply is depleted in the deep ocean. With sufficient sulfate availability, sulfur reducing bacteria take over via the anaerobic pathway 2CH2O + SO4 <=> H2S + 2HCO3. While this H2S producing nutrient pump is running, obligate anaerobes can then begin climbing up the water column until photosynthetic sulfidic organisms like purple/green sulfur bacteria begin flourishing which perform photosynthesis by oxidizing H2S into elemental sulfur. This basic cycle is also covered in the reference image on the Wikipedia article for euxinia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:How_oceans_become_euxinic.png In the absence of sufficient sulfur you'll instead just get a ferruginous anoxic environment in the deep ocean, and I know too little about them to make any claims about how they work. This stratification requirement is why we also worry about slowdown of vertical mixing in the ocean via slowdown of the thermohaline circulation and in particular the Atlantic meridional overturning current portion of it. This cycle which results in sustained euxinia has been hypothesized as a cause of the permian-triassic mass extinction where atmospheric H2S levels are responsible both for direct toxicity to aerobic life as well as rapid depletion of the ozone layer. If you're interested in a deeper overview of hypothesized euxinia in the end Permian, I recommend this video by Peter Ward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtHlsUDVVy0 Notorious R.I.M. fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 03:00
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From a paleoclimate perspective, sedimentary weathering has been the main knob that manages carbon drawdown (and it increases the total alkalinity of seawater as an added bonus). Unfortunately, we are loving things up on the wrong time scale compared to what it operates on and we're further inhibiting it with sulfate aerosol production lowering precipitation rates. But if I had to look at geoengineering knobs to crank way up, that's probably where I'd start. If you want to take some azolla event route to speed things up, make sure whatever you're sinking stays sunk or at least continues aerobic cycles not anaerobic ones. Making a permanent algae bloom then walking away is madness that only looks at one tiny component of the earth system.
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Jan 16, 2019 03:51
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Infinite Karma posted:So, essentially limestone is the geologically stable carbon sequester system? Can we make a permanent algae bloom if they are the kind of algae with CaCO3 shells? Yes, and now you need to manage the carbonate rain rate and lysocline depth so that you can maximally sequester carbon at depth while allowing carbonate life to exist by not loving up the carbonate cycle or pH too badly. Difficult but possible maybe, hard to do worse than what we're already doing to ocean pH.
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Jan 16, 2019 04:31
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Ocean ventilation management sounds exciting!
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Jan 16, 2019 04:33
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Insanite posted:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems This research has been out for several months. Not sure why the guardian decided to run a story on it now. I had saved this very telling figure from the source study:  quote:Comparison of the average dry-weight biomass of arthropods caught per 12-h day in 10 ground (A) and canopy (B) traps within the same sampling area in the Luquillo rainforest. Numbers above the bars give the mean daily catch rate in dry weight of arthropods per day for the respective dates. Data for 1976 and 1977 are from Lister
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Jan 16, 2019 18:44
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dream9!bed!! posted:Anyone been talking about the fracturing of the polar vortex? Apparently we should see hugely warm temperatures in the Arctic in the next few weeks and brutally cold ones in the US from Kansas eastward. Folks on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum are freaking out a little. Strong sudden stratospheric warmings that split the night time stratospheric PV are nothing new. They mostly happen in the northern hemisphere. What's interesting is that we have one on back to back years and we have a scenario that could result in multiple sustained disruptive events to the PV in one season. I also don't think folks on the ASIF are freaking out. If you're looking to terrify yourself there's plenty of information on Hansen's ice climate feedback in the Antarctica subforum there.
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Jan 16, 2019 18:50
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Son of Rodney posted:
There's the Arctic Sea Ice Forums as referenced on here constantly. Fair warning, make a note of which posters are idiots and which know their poo poo. There are some extremely smart professionals in there mixed in with a few crackpot idiots. There's also Dr. Hayhoe's twitter list of scientists that do climate related work: https://twitter.com/khayhoe/lists/scientists-who-do-climate?lang=en
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Jan 16, 2019 21:27
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Nobnob posted:This is one of the most horrifying report I've ever read. From the research it affects floor dwelling insects moreso than canopy dwelling ones leading the authors to postulate that changes in soil respiration may be a causal factor. However all trap mechanisms showed decreased caught biomass. For what a long-term insect mass extinction looks like, the Permian-triassic mass extinction is the only real analog we have.
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Jan 16, 2019 23:14
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Nobnob posted:Given these numbers and reports I find it increasingly difficult to understand that merely now after this terrible summer people even begin to get an idea of what global warming might actually mean, despite none of this being a complete surprise or actual news. You can spook even the worst idiot boomers by asking where the insects went.
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Jan 17, 2019 19:13
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