Fun article, and it's true that there's uncertainity about the future of the AMOC and consequences that might flow.
The real meat is the undercurrent and framing .. from a PR standpoint this is advanced late stage fossil fuel advocacy from the Saudi Oil Machine; head to the end and the message is Yes! Climate Change (AGW) is Real and a threat .. but don't stop consuming fossil fuels!!
The advocacy here is for pumping sulfur into the stratosphere and burying CO2.
What's sidestepped is the band aid temporary nature (with side effects) of continuously emmitting sulfur and the fundementally not even break even state of CO2 sequestration .. the largest carbon removal project on the planet emits a good magnitude (and more) CO2 than it buries as it's literally an excuse to keep extracting a lot of gas while using a tiny amount for some back pressure in the field.
> there's uncertainity about the future of the AMOC
In the long view, there is no uncertainty, we know that the AMOC will fluctuate and likely fail completely at some point, we just don't know exactly when. Just as the Sahara will likely bloom again, and the locations of all current coastal cities will some day be underwater, we just don't know when.
This is not an argument for accelerating these changes, and continuing to emit CO2, sulfur, and other poisonous pollutants into the atmosphere, however. It is an argument for realizing that the planet is and will always be in climate flux, whether affected by human activity or not, and that our long term strategy needs to be adaptation and cooperation, not to engineer the climate to stay as it was in 1700 and selfishly laying claim to temporarily blessed locations.
> It is an argument for realizing that the planet is and will always be in climate flux, whether affected by human activity or not, and that our long term strategy needs to be adaptation and cooperation, not to engineer the climate to stay as it was in 1700 and selfishly laying claim to temporarily blessed locations.
The climate flux would take thousands to millions of year to run its course before anthropogenic activity accelerating it by thousand-fold. In that case we could adapt easily since even evolution, as slow as it is, was capable of doing so without technology.
We know that things change, including the climate, the tectonic plates, etc., the issue is how fast things change, that's where catastrophe lies and the call is not to keep the climate as close as possible to the 1700s but to deal with the mess we created and slow down the process of change so not only humans but other species have the chance to adapt as well.
Could indeed have been insightful, if it was correct. It isn't: rapid climate change is nothing new, it has been more or less the norm since long before humans entered the scene.
Sure. First of all you can have a look at the linked graph of temperatures, especially the Pleistocene. The wildly fluctuating levels indicate how temperatures change abruptly over a few decades as a rule as glaciations came and went. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:...)
And that is without even mentioning all the great extinction events that have taken place.
So much for the thought that the current climate change is unique among climate events. But let's not forget the greater point here: this fact doesn't mean that our situation isn't precarious. It just means means we can't tap into the quasi-religious notion that humans (or those dirty oil profiteers) somehow wrecked a pristine world in perfect balance. It still means we need to stop polluting the planet (in a myriad of ways), and that we have grave adaptive challenges ahead that we need to start working on ASAP.
> our long term strategy needs to be adaptation and cooperation, not to engineer the climate to stay as it was in 1700 and selfishly laying claim to temporarily blessed locations.
Honest question, why? If we can, why shouldn’t we?
Also, cooperation with what? These are all complex systems with feedback loops which we have been impacting for centuries. There is nothing to cooperate with. The question remains: how well do we understand them and what can we do?
If we could, i.e. had the means and could know all the side-effects, then maybe; why not. The thing is, we are nowhere near such capabilities. People who think so are simply misguided. Perhaps in some distant future, but my bet is still on adaptation rather than some global climate regulation scheme that is forever likely to go horribly wrong.
>cooperation with what?
I meant human-to-human cooperation. Climate change will for the foreseeable future result in migration pressures, either because a city has sunk into the ocean or previously fertile farmland turned to desert. In history this has so far solved this by military means, I'm simply advocating a more civilized approach.
> Your comment reads as a deflection from the fact that human activity IS the cause
If it comes across thus then I believe it has less to do with what I actually wrote, and more to do with a feverishly polarized discourse fuelled by US party politics where you either have to stay on a narrow path of accepted talking points or you must belong to "the dark side". The notion that climate change has not been rapid before is just one of the misunderstandings that flourish in such a debate climate.
As a matter of fact we will, for all conceivable future, have to be prepared to adapt to rapid climate change for whatever reason, be it because of interstellar events, volcano eruptions or simply because of tipping points reached as a consequence of a slow iterative change. It irks me that I have to repeat me total commitment to the abandonment of fossil fuel and the urgent adaptation of sustainable energy sources, just because I mention some basic facts that don't fit in the current feverishly polarized discourse.
But, for the sake of clarity; I do. The linked article is a prime example of how suppressing facts because they seem inconvenient for "the cause" opens up for the other side to seem "more scientific". It is simply not a good strategy.
I'm sorry but "we should be more adaptable" is clearly just misdirection from the actual thing at stake: the need to stop this insane rate of change caused by humans.
The fact that there were or will be future rapid changes is insignificant, considering their frequency and scale compared to human caused change. See the hockey stick graph or https://xkcd.com/1732/.
I don't know what feverish polarized politics you refer to since I'm not in the US but you have to understand that the words you are writing mirror the tactics used by big oil to delay change.
Those are good examples of partisan politics misinforming people about climate history, by leaving out 99% of it.
In fact, we're still below the historical average temperature on Earth and about 12C below the hottest times, as the following complete graph (500 million years) shows:
> The fact that there were or will be future rapid changes is insignificant, considering their frequency and scale compared to human caused change
As you can see on that graph, the scale of human caused climate change is smaller than many past natural climate changes. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, for example, began with a global mean temperature rise between 5C and 8C.
CO2 storage is also dangerous and very deadly when it goes wrong.
Plenty of examples of natural CO2 storages (in or under lakes for example) that wipe out anything that breathes (including vehicles) in a certain radius.
> What's sidestepped is the band aid temporary nature (with side effects) of continuously emmitting sulfur and the fundementally not even break even state of CO2 sequestration
That is completely untrue and the usual disingenuous "let’s never talk about capture and geo engineering less it distracts from our goal of reforming the world from morally impure practice" served by the traditional aler-mondialists/ecologists.
The fact is, even if we reach net zero in 2050 - which is unlikely - the amount of GHC in the atmosphere will be quite high and the capacity of the ocean to absorb some which we are relying upon is far from infinite and might be slowing down. We need capture. We won’t fix the issue without. And to do that we need time which geoengineering could give us.
Regarding the emission of capture projects, I am assuming you are using the traditional accounting trick ecologists use when they want to discredit something: you count the full estimation of emission during construction with no amortisation using a broad accounting scope for companies involved, use the average worldwide emission for a watt discounting the actual source of energy used, and associate GHC to water use?
> The fact is, even if we reach net zero in 2050 - which is unlikely - the amount of GHC in the atmosphere will be quite high and the capacity of the ocean to absorb some which we are relying upon is far from infinite and might be slowing down. We need capture. We won’t fix the issue without. And to do that we need time which geoengineering could give us.
The amount of energy required to recapture the emitted CO2 is mind-boggling though. Reducing it in terms of thermodynamics give a better overlook on how absurd the amount of energy would be required to revert CO2 into some other stable form that can be buried somewhere, as much as I'd love some magical technology enabling that we simply do not have the tech, we do not have the abundance of energy to capture even 1% of the CO2 emitted in a year.
If we went full sci-fi with dependable fusion reactors providing as clean and cheap energy as possible we would still need many, many reactors tasked with just providing energy to capture CO2.
That is precisely the reason to invest a lot in the snake oil and sham direct air/sea capture of CO2. Because to solve such insane infrastructure problem we need centuries. If we start today (I mean start seriously), then by 2300 we may have some working and scalable tech and can finally start (only start!) getting towards so called "net zero". If we will start in 2300, then we'll get it working in 2500. Dates are an example, but the principle will hold with any range.
And without CO2 capture from air or sea will will only increase global heating for centuries in the future.
> That is completely untrue and the usual disingenuous "let’s never talk about capture and geo engineering less it distracts from our goal of reforming the world from morally impure practice" served by the traditional aler-mondialists/ecologists.
Respectfully. Bollocks.
It is absolutely demonstrably true that the article linked here sidesteps how sulfur emmissions are a band aid solution requiring constant topping up that fail to address underlying issues.
It is absolutely demonstrably true that the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet hasn't yet met it's own goals and when and if it does the amounts stashed below will be tiny in comparison to the amount released.
> traditional aler-mondialists/ecologists.
Yeah, you might want to work on that, I'm retired from a career in global exploration geophysics for transnational energy and mineral resource concerns .. that's a full antipodean faceplant of an over reach there.
> I am assuming
You're incorrect.
> you count the full estimation of emission during construction
> It is absolutely demonstrably true that the article linked here sidesteps how sulfur emmissions are a band aid solution requiring constant topping up that fail to address underlying issues.
No one denies that. That never was the point. The issue is that the reality is that unless somehow a miracle happens we are not going to reach net zero in time to avoid major issues, key point being "in time". We need more time.
> It is absolutely demonstrably true that the largest CO2 sequestration project on the planet hasn't yet met it's own goals and when and if it does the amounts stashed below will be tiny in comparison to the amount released.
Patently untrue. And even if it was true (which it isn’t to be clear), we need advance in sequestration. That’s a prerequisite to net zero working. We might get away with what the ocean will absorb if we reach net zero quickly but: one, that’s not going to happen, two, there is good reason to think the ocean sinking ability will slow down.
Also well done on cleverly sidestepping the part on accounting tricks which you know to be fully true.
I'm not angry, I'm Australian and that's an extremely amused response without a wit of anger to a vapid comment that rolled in on a fog of barely baked assumptions.
I have no preconceptions re: the other party (although they clearly had a picture of who I was and where I was coming from), I merely responded to the factual basis of what was said .. which was largely, as we say here, bollocks.
As for
> why topics like these get stripped from the front page within minutes of showing up.
that had already long happened by the time I came back to look at the responses to my hot take on the article .. a Saudi funded media outlet riding on the back of recent reports of AMOC instability to wedge in a "fossil fuels are still great" message under the guise of climate concern.
I live on the coast of Norway so I am trying to keep up with the research. It is exactly as the article says: Even if there's "only" a 10% chance, or even 5%, that's a huge risk to take to stay. So I think it's important to pay attention to this henceforward.
Are you advocating that people leave Norway based on a questionable idea regarding a hypothetical event that's not even remotely shown itself in actual measurements?
I'm not sure calling the collapse of the AMOC a "questionable idea regarding a hypothetical event that's not even remotely shown itself in actual measurement" maps with reality. Scientists have been dumping data to models and for a few years this possiblity has gone from unlikely to "it could happen within the next 5 to 10 years".
Look at Canada or Russia and you see what will happen. It will be too cold to grow most crops as well as today, but it wont be another ice age, humans will still survive in the area albeit you might need a bit more energy to heat your homes and food will be blander or rely on imports (food diversity coming from imports wouldn't be very different from today though...).
Climate change ensures no ice age will happen again for millions of years, the ice age happened since earth was extremely low on Co2 it wont happen at the rates we have now.
Meanwhile, by next summer I need to have my european home (northern romania, at about the same latitude as austria and the south of germany) fully covered by air conditioning.
I absolutely didn't need it until, say, last year. And since last year repeated this year, I'm not waiting any more.
I would get it installed now but everyone is out of stock :)
And yes, this article is subtly selling something.
Yep, the time where we don't need AC in Europe is long over. But the laws haven't caught up with this development yet (i.e. no mandatory AC in apartment buildings yet, or worse, some landlords actually seem to think they can forbid you from having it) which is very frustrating.
I got an AC heat pump installed 3 years ago, because the literal walls in my apartment were too hot to lean on after the constant sun + extremely well done insulation + massive walls.
Before that I can remember only a handful of nights in the last 20 years I had trouble sleeping because it was too hot.
Those are generally called coolers, not air conditioners, because they add moisture to the air instead of removing it. They're also not even remotely as strong, and barely do anything in high humidity.
The problem is that with covid, ongoing wars close home, and economics, goverments let all compromises fell down, additionally the way the fridays for future and other movements decided to protest with their infrastructure blocking actions, the regular population is starting to lose interest on their message, thus nothing really effective happens, as means to fix everything.
There is a lot of research done right now, funded by the EU. But uncertainties are huge, and the tipping point for the Amoc could be between 2050 and 8065 [0].
It's a complex problem, and almost impossible to model correctly, but that doesn't make it science fiction.
I enjoyed "state of fear" but it's important to read the takedown on his bad science.
Great airport adventure thriller. Terrible footnotes. The man was a cooker. He bought a lot of bad chart interpretation to the table and the idea of a Mafioso green movement using as yet uninvented ground shakers and carbon fibre lightning conductors is pure james bond.
What is it with pot boilers and poison? Dan Brown had anaphylactic nut liquor, Crichton has blue ring octopi.
I suggest a simple take, it's essentially evident that the climate change, and we know from history that's always happen. How it will change it's very uncertain.
As a result we need to been able to adapt, which design allow us to adapt? A spread life, small semi-autonomous buildings, something quick to be built, with all raw materials easy to source locally, transformable at small scale locally, with the littlest dependency of fixed on-land large infra. Oh, actually is the sole part of the Green Deal who seems to work.
New single-family homes, sheds, well insulated, designed to use the Sun as much as possible, with THE VERY SAME DESIGN in all climate. Thinks seriously: do you know any working smart-city? Neom, Arkadag, Innopolis, the original Fordlandia? Do you know large projects that do works well? Conversely do you have seen or built a modern home, a modern shed, and hey, that's worked? Do you realize how "identical" are modern small buildings from the poles, the tropic, deserts etc? How easy to adapt they are?
Now decide for yourself which part of the Green New Deal can realistically be done and which can't.
It's not complicated. The temperature of the planet as a whole goes up. But depending on the effects (which are complex) some places may get colder, some wetter, some hotter and drier. The average adds up to an increase in temperature; this is global warming, manifested in changes to local climates.
It's just a more descriptive wording. Some people get confused since global warming doesn't mean it automatically gets warmer everywhere. Ironically, it should probably help you understand too...
I'll bite. Not because I think I can change your behavior, but just so that others passing by don't end up taking your comment as having value.
> First it's global warming, then ice age, then again global warming...
Imagine a car that's lost a wheel and is careening down the highway out of control. The passenger screams "the truck behind us is gonna ram us!". Then: "we're going to faaaast, slow down!" Then it's "watch the barrier on the left, go right go right!", and then finally "watch the lightpole on the right!"
I assume you ridicule this passenger saying he doesn't even seem to know what the problem is?
> Then when they realize we have realized that they don't know what they are talking about they use vague terms as "climate change" to gaslight us into thinking they know what they are talking about.
It's impressive, really. Thousands and thousands of scientists spend their entire careers studying the physics of the atmosphere. From this they conclude, through painstaking work, backed up by data, that the atmosphere is becoming warmer – i.e. more energetic – due to human activity. The effects of this is aggrevated extremes. Hotter heatwaves. Colder cold snaps. Drier droughts. Wetter floods. And potentially (and now we're not in established science, but rather informed speculation) collapsing ocean currents that can lead to much colder temperatures in some places.
Yet you, brilliant NotGMan, you throw out all of that. You lean back, hammer your keyboard, and declare that these brilliant people "don't know what they are talking about". Unlike you, oh brilliant NotGMan, of course! _You_ know! Right?
> It's impressive, really. Thousands and thousands of scientists spend their entire careers studying the physics of the atmosphere. From this they conclude, through painstaking work, backed up by data, that the atmosphere is becoming warmer – i.e. more energetic – due to human activity.
All good until you understand that unless you are part of those experts (true experts, the one who never parrot anything and won't fall to ego self-tricks), you need to prefix your paragraph with "the scientific consensus brought to me by mass medias is:".
Fact is you seem very vulnerable to Gell-Mann amnesia compounded by Wikipedia "reliable sources" bias, from the way you write.
Feel free to correct me. There's of course limited actual scientific substance that fits into a dozens-of-words HN comment, but any improvement is welcome.
I read the climategate emails myself - instead of reading Snopes and co. "factchecking" - and you can too. There is no proof of a "big lie" in it, but plenty of malpractice and lack of scientific integrity.
The "correction" (more like a warning) is in the trust one should have in those institutions and the data they produce.
Thus, treating anyone skeptical of the complete theory of human-induced global warming (which is different from not wanting to reduce pollution, mind you) as a troglodyte who "goes against the SCIENCE^tm" isn't wise at all.
> Thus, treating anyone skeptical of the complete theory of human-induced global warming (which is different from not wanting to reduce pollution, mind you) as a troglodyte who "goes against the SCIENCE^tm" isn't wise at all.
I assume you by this mean that it's not wise to treat everyone who goes against the consensus as a troglodyte. Not that everyone who does so should be exempt from being treated as a troglodyte. The latter would be pretty silly.
I'm not doing that. I'm simply pointing out that if someone goes against said consensus, they damn well be prepared to provide the evidence of why they're right. That burden does not fall on those who assume that the vast body of established science is, in fact, correct. Someone thinking that they can just armchair their way out of scientific consensus is, indeed, a troglodyte.
You're implying that the only reasonable reason to doubt data is contradicting data. Which is what I'm objecting to, since funding and media representation in science certainly isn't favourable to this way of thinking.
Sometimes, "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" is wiser than "nothing better to challenge it".
The crux of the problem in your post is the use of the words "consensus" and "established" when these can easily be manufactured (and the infamous climategate shows such social engineering, even without debating the scientific truth or untruth of the matter). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_... is a very good illustration of the problem at hand (ignore the possibly loaded title, it's not what you may think)
> You're implying that the only reasonable reason to doubt data is contradicting data.
No. I'm implying that the only reasonable reason to doubt massive amounts of data that has been, and is being, actively studied by thousands upon thousands of experts for decades, is contradicting data. Perhaps more importantly, I'm implying that armchairing an opinion on the matter carries zero weight.
> Which is what I'm objecting to, since funding and media representation in science certainly isn't favourable to this way of thinking.
Science's very imperfect funding structures do indeed cause worthwhile endeavours to go unexplored. That's sad. But irrelevant here, as it does not invalidate the conclusions from endeavours that are funded.
> Sometimes, "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" is wiser than "nothing better to challenge it".
Absolutely! For example when evidence is scant and a problem is under-studied. My problem is that you and OP seem to leap from that fact to that always being true. Climate change is not such a case, and unless you have large amounts of contradictive data, you're an idiot for saying "I don't know". And if you did have vast amounts of contradicting data, you'd bring it!
>
a-french-anon 24 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Is Europe headed towards a new Ice Age as ocean cu...
You're implying that the only reasonable reason to doubt data is contradicting data. Which is what I'm objecting to, since funding and media representation in science certainly isn't favourable to this way of thinking.
Sometimes, "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" is wiser than "nothing better to challenge it".
> The crux of the problem in your post is the use of the words "consensus" and "established" when these can easily be manufactured
No. You clearly have zero clue how science works.
> (and the infamous climategate shows such social engineering, even without debating the scientific truth or untruth of the matter).
It's about the same impact that a 0.04% width of steel has on the flight of a bullet through 5,000 metres of atmosphere.
The vast bulk of the atmosphere is transparent to infrared radiation, it has no insulation properties at all to speak of.
The only reason our planet isn't a freezing ball is the actual insulation we do have .. and that's the 0.04% you're so flippantly and ignorantly dismissive of.
When that insulation doubles or halves it's a big deal indeed .. and yet still a tiny percentage of the atmosphere.
Try swallowing 0.04% by your body weight of a toxin and tell us how that goes .. by your "logic" that should be trivial to shrug off.
Are you saying that things whose concentrations are expressed in what in your daily life is a small number are unimportant? Would be great if you could be completely explicit about this, so that people can reply to something concrete. Thanks.
I'm very disappointed to see climate change deniers on this forum.
The effect of carbon dioxide on global warming has been proven a million times over. Small percentages can significantly affect heat capture from the sun. A quick overview[1].
Even at 0.1% CO2, you'll feel it (light-headedness, dizzy). Around 3-5% you'll be dead.
CO2 is rising at a rate 100x faster than pretty much ever. But you're right, its only 0.04% i'm sure we'll be fine [2]
The real meat is the undercurrent and framing .. from a PR standpoint this is advanced late stage fossil fuel advocacy from the Saudi Oil Machine; head to the end and the message is Yes! Climate Change (AGW) is Real and a threat .. but don't stop consuming fossil fuels!!
( brought to us by Robin M. Mills, CEO of Qamar Energy and author of 'The Myth of the Oil Crisis' and https://www.thenationalnews.com/about-us/ )
The advocacy here is for pumping sulfur into the stratosphere and burying CO2.
What's sidestepped is the band aid temporary nature (with side effects) of continuously emmitting sulfur and the fundementally not even break even state of CO2 sequestration .. the largest carbon removal project on the planet emits a good magnitude (and more) CO2 than it buries as it's literally an excuse to keep extracting a lot of gas while using a tiny amount for some back pressure in the field.