"Gloom and doom" never solves a problem. Many of us have not chosen hospice for Mother Earth (yet).

http://www.sinkswatch.org/campaign/carbon-sinks-101

http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/07/five-groups-leading-the-charge-to-halt-climate-change/

There are things we can and should do, but change will not occur in time frames of a few decades or centuries, even if you drive the greenhouse gas level back down, a process that in itself will take decades or centuries.

In 1910, going to the Moon was impossible. In 1956 nuclear war was thought to be inevitable. In 1982 AIDS was a death sentence.

We created the carbon problem. We can solve it. Development of alternative energy sources is proceeding rapidly and that will make a huge difference. Sequestration is the other part of the solution. China just passed Germany in solar power and will continue:

So what? Is this your argument: we will always find a technical fix? Mindless optimism? In fact we won't find any quick fix, it will be long hard slog, and we might fail.

How is your defeatism constructive? Honestly?

I mean, unless you are a masochist, and enjoy the thought of suffering.

"No, we can't!"

After all, it came from a full decade of following environmental, ecological and social-justice news on a daily basis, and reading much of the science behind the news. It was studying anthropology and ecology in conjunction with evolutionary psychology that finally made the penny drop for me.

You may not like pessimism, but that doesn't make it incorrect.

I've written a lot about my journey from technological optimism to realistic pessimism on my website: Approaching the Limits.

It's a drain, a black hole - demanding energy to attend to its fears and predictions of gloom.

You don't stop fighting. However, what you choose to do, how you choose to fight, what you feel to be important in the face of this news, may all change. It may even change for the better. This is what happened to me.

On the other hand, you have cited no source or back-up for your confident assertion that reducing atmospheric carbon is:

The OP says some of the "DAMAGE" is irreversible -- NOT climate change itself.

Rather than mope and cower, subscribing to the realistic idea that we have destroyed the world and humanity and there is LESS than ZERO anyone can ever do about it - now or ever.

Ostrich!

Seriously, how the FUCK is that attitude valuable?

The article says that we are at risk of creating irreversible damage. (Which is kind of a "duh.&quot

The headline would more accurately reflect the text of the article if they had used the word "foreseen" instead of the word "seen." Not that it's actually wrong the way it is, but it is ambiguous (and ambiguous in such a way as to make it potentially more sensational).

It's only irreversible if we continue on the path or trying to reduce emissions while blindly ignoring other solutions.

Carbon dioxide molecules can be split into its base components of carbon and oxygen. Currently, it is expensive and inefficient to carry out this procedure on the scale needed to reverse climate change. However, I have no doubt some enterprising scientist will solve the puzzle and save all of humanity.

Other pollutants will have similar solutions.

It takes natural processes 600 to 700 years to remove 1 ppmv C02 from the atmosphere. We're putting in 2.5 ppmv every single year. So we're emitting it 1500 times faster than nature can clean it up.

We emit 35 billion tonnes of CO2 every year. If we wanted to get atmospheric CO2 down to 300 ppmv within 100 years (which is the true safe level, not 350), we would need to first sequester that 35 GT every year (or everything we emit) then pull out an additional 7.5 GT (25% of all the CO2 now in the atmosphere) - every year for the next century.

I know of no artificial process that can do this, or even come close. Even doing any of it at all takes significant energy, which we need to keep our global civilization from collapsing.

To a first approximation, we've got nothing. Let's do what we can (cause it's what we do), but in the full realization that at the 99.9% confidence level, our efforts will probably amount to a fart in a hurricane.

Others are working on more ways to sequester carbon:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/10/carbon-capture-storage

In China, they have reforrested parts of the Yellow River Valley:

There are major issues of scale.

and ways to get carbon out of the atmosphere. Let's not give up now.

We would still have to remove about a third of the existing CO2 from the atmosphere, deacidify the oceans, restore the world's forests, restore all the lost biodiversity and wild species habitats, and completely change the world's agriculture system. And also completely change its economic, financial and governance systems so that we're not just kicking the can down the road by a century or two.

Do you have any idea just how badly we've fucked up the planet?

Here's a quick graphic glance at just one of our non-CO2 problems:



I know I won't convince you of any of this, but it may be useful to others reading this thread.

Maybe you were getting confused with Sleipnir (Norwegian project)?
Or one of the far more numerous deployments that extract even more oil from the ground
by pumping in CO2 (so that they can greenwash their efforts to please short-sighted
technophiles)?

Sleipnir was the nearest thing to a success that the CCS fraud has ever managed
to produce and, IIRC, even that has now stopped. Remember, there is only a finite
amount of storage possible in a finite reservoir.

Or maybe you were thinking of those even more blatant scams that abound:
>> One Chinese CCS plant uses the CO2 for fizzy drinks.


Do you perhaps consider "sequestration" to mean "held somewhere for a short time
before being released into the atmosphere"?



> In China, they have reforrested parts of the Yellow River Valley:

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on their better-funded energy projects:

>> Currently 16 coal base sites are being built and many are operational.
>> One being constructed in Inner Mongolia will eventually occupy nearly 400 square
>> miles—almost the size of the sprawling city of Los Angeles.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140213/chinas-plan-clean-air-cities-will-doom-climate-scientists-say?page=show

"Mankind has done lots of things that naysayers said we couldn't do..."

Like eradicating war, poverty, hunger and disease?
Stupid naysayers probably still think wars and hunger still exists...

But you know what, this thread is nothing more than an e-Jonestown suicide cult circle jerk, and I'm done.

"a process that in itself will take decades or centuries..."

I would think as much. It took us 175 years of industrialization to reach the point in which we merely acknowledge there is a problem. Finding the solution, enacting the solution, and then waiting on the solution to work may take just as long if not longer.

She counts time in epochs. The bald monkey, OTOH, is not going to make it through this, at least not many of us. And we are going to take down so many species with us. But Mother Earth will shake off the fleas and fix herself, in a million years or so.

is correct, but we ants do not have the time to wait for Mother to get well.

It would even be good for the economy, to develop new energy sources, figure out better ways of doing things so the impact is minimal. Hell, whole new technologies could be developed. A lot of it could be paid by repurposing the subsidies to oil companies.

But instead we have Republicans.

there are many MANY things we can do be doing. We just have to agree to truly get started on the fix. The longer we wait, the longer it will take.

Thanks for the links.

If Ebola-Zaire breaks out of Africa, that is going to happen a lot sooner than that.

The ecosystem can stand 7 billion ants. It can't stand 7 billion people. It is poised to fight back.

it's not supposed to be that easy to communicate.

I don't give it any 500 years, maybe a couple more decades with luck. All those sick and ill-nourished people are just waiting for the right bug to come along.

Worldwide, the estimate is 321,035,624,829,901,000. I personally think that's low too.

next 15 years. The end of this century is more than a lifetime away for most of us, 86 years from now.

Insurance companies aren't waiting. They are suing now for action:

world. Climate change is not giving us much of a choice. I think at the moment the methane holes in the north are very dangerous.

I see two choices: 1. We can continue the way we are and not make needed changes and end up back in the past trying to live off the land that is drastically damaged. Back to an agrarian era when we did everything by hand. And there was great scarcity. 2. We can start working to make this a sustainable world for as many people as we can and maybe that will also lead back to an agrarian world but some of the modern ideas like solar and wind energy and localize/urban farming ideas will make it easier and hopefully keep us from staving to death. Both conservation and birth control are part of this.

Either way we are not going to continue to live as we do now. I know there are people working on these things but when it comes to getting them working we should be starting now on a worldwide basis.

And the energy industry and the rest to the corporations are going to be back there with us. Because you cannot eat money. So all the money they are hoarding is not going to keep them safe if they do not join this effort toward a sustainable world.

... they will be dead when the planet will extinct most living creatures, and Chinese-Indians want more cars, more carbon.

into the first choice. Wonderful.

Although I barely have any substantial amount of money, I'll be dead by then too.

Unfortunately, the first choice will happen, whether I object to it (as I do) or not.

Concrete short-term issues like jobs and housing almost always win over abstract long-term threats like climate change. The human brain has a built-in discount function that reduces the emotional urgency attached to long-term threats. We evolved this mechanism in order to ensure that we would respond urgently to immediate survival threats. Unfortunately, we out-clevered our evolutionary history, and it's biting us in the ass.

"the murderous maniac we supported in Managua shot an American! panic!"
"the Nicaraguans overthrew the murderous maniac we supported! panic!"
"the supporters of the murderous maniac we supported in Managua are running drugs! order some more from them and then panic!"
"Afghanistan's in turmoil! panic!"
"the ultraconservative Islamism we supported in Af-Pak has turned on us! panic!"
"the dictators in Damascus and Tripoli that we sent detainees to, praised as finally coming in from the cold, shook hands with and dined with--we don't like any more! panc!"
"the al Qaeda types we funded and armed against the dictators in Damascus and Tripoli are acting like al Qaeda! panic!"

every damn time!

capitalism: the systematic overindulgence of production and consumption.

humans are weak willed creatures who care not for their offspring.

This is just another so-called "data point" in the plot by liberals to kill jobs and destroy America. Plus, it's another reason to distrust the UN.

Last edited Tue Aug 26, 2014, 07:28 PM - Edit history (1)

form the ocean bed. Yea, that's next.

The methane stored in permafrost that's currently melting, is way worse than what cars are putting in the air. Enough of it and it's just run away global warming.

Been reading about this for a while in Scientific American, and in New Scientist. Several separate articles over the course of years, all saying the same thing.

Frankly the methane bubbles are sort of freaking me out.

We needed to doing something about this years and years ago but nope.

Hey, you see that missile coming at us, let's wait and see if it kills us.



-p

Unfortunately we r just along for the ride now.

The Oligarchs are suddenly missing when it's time to take care of the planet and its teeming penniless inhabitants. They live on a cloud in the air, apparently.

I'm making up the numbers, but replace them with expert figures:

"Imagine a world where your electric bill is $2,000 a month to protect from extreme temperatures."

"Imagine a world where children can't walk to school without AC masks cooling the air so they can breathe."

"Imagine a world where construction costs are ten times higher because homes and businesses have to be built underground."

"Imagine a world where a hot and humid summer means your child can't be outdoors for more than five minutes or face likely death."

"Do you like the costs of bug extermination now? Enjoy having to pay those expenses on a weekly basis."

"Do you like the idea of a world where your water bill costs more than a heroin habit? Keep pumping out the greenhouse gases."