Climate Change and the Environment

Just made it into one of the white areas. We’ve been lucky here in SoCal this summer so far.

It must have been really bad in already hot SE Asia.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnCornyn/status/1162449431704162304

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What a piece of shit.

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https://twitter.com/BudGothmog44/status/1162468681739374594

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Pictures are so powerful. Can you imagine how bad it would look without those regulations?

Yup and according to this map it looks like most of the USA and Canada had cooler than average or near average temps for the first half of this year while the rest of the world is on fire. Probably going to result in more inaction and denial. :frowning:

https://twitter.com/NOAA/status/1162017562873487360

Yeah anecdotally where I live, North Texas, it has been an extremely mild summer. But it has rained more in the summer than I can remember (not an official stat).

Undoubtedly people conflating the lower temperatures with global warming being a hoax. When in reality the global warming issues probably play a role in the amount of rain we have seen which is the main reason temperatures have been down.

Because even posters on this site describe nuclear as cheap, safe and environmentally clean.

103 tons of carbon per acre seems completely absurd. Intensively managed pine produces something like 10 tons of biological growth of dry timber per year, and timber is only half carbon. So the claim here is that empresstree is 20x as productive as commercial timber species (which are chosen in large part for high productivity). The forest service has a bit of skepticism here:

Once established, princesstree growth may be rapid [41,58], and survival may be high [129] even in harsh environments, but reports are variable. Aboveground growth of seedlings is typically slow during the first year [34,62], when seedlings invest heavily in belowground growth [90,91]. Johnson and others [70] report a 220% increase in root growth of young seedlings over a 3-year period in field experiments in Virginia. Rapid seedling root development makes this species difficult to control (see Control). A shift in emphasis from belowground to aboveground biomass accumulation occurs between the 1st and 2nd year [90]. In reviews, height increases of over 7 feet (2 m)/year have been reported for cultivated Paulownia seedlings [37]. Many authors report findings on perhaps extraordinary individuals. A 20-year-old princesstree observed in Kentucky had a diameter of 14 inches (36 cm) and reached a height of 62 feet (19 m) [144]. Typically, however, growth rate is much less. For example, mean annual height growth of seedlings after direct seeding on surface-mine spoils in eastern Kentucky averaged 24 inches (60 cm)/year

Nevermind I found it the footnotes are all links lol. Am dumb. I would point out that pine is selected for timber QUALITY and output rather than just output. There’s no question paulownia would produce an inferior timber $ output vs a pine.

When we’re looking at the trees we’re going to use for carbon capture in the future it probably won’t randomly be any of the trees we’ve been using commercially to date. They haven’t been selected for their ability to justify carbon offsets.

EDIT: To be clear I think industry will figure out how to use the timber when there’s lots of it available cheap. I think wood products in general are going to be replacing plastic in a big big way over the next 20-30 years.

So the climate models had some worst case predictions for 2070 for Greenland ice. Unfortunately, those predictions just happened this year. We are 51 years ahead of the worst case models.

In short, we are fucked. So much goes into the global climate. We can’t even accurately predict the weather 5 hours in advance; our models for the future are likely way off and we are more screwed than we ever thought. There are likely many factors that accelerate the downfall exponentially that the models aren’t accurately accounting for.

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It doesn’t go evenly. That’s always been how it is. Greenland got both barrels this year. Panicking might be justified but that doesn’t make it into a good choice.

We’re definitely going to have to do some bigger stuff to get out of this mess. No question.

I think the worst of the doomsday thinking is hyperbolic. There have been times when it’s been hotter and there has been more carbon in the air. I think there must be some significant negative feedback that keeps temperatures within some bounds. But, things like sea levels have been much higher in the past and the likely sea level rise this century is going to fuck things up for like a billion people.

There’s no good reason to not take drastic action, especially when most of the drastic action to be taken is going to have other benefits as well.

Has there been any substantial progress on the sulfur cloud seeding or whatever the hype was about a few years ago? It sounded promising but then radio silence

Yes it goes unevenly. The point is that we can’t come even close to accurately modeling this shit which means we have no clue how bad it’s going to get or how it’s going to manifest itself or even how fast it will accelerate. The 1.5-2 degree limit is just a guesstimate; it could be that 1 degree was the real limit and now it’ll snowball out of control.

The time to act was 30 years ago. And now that that time has past, the time to act is now. And we don’t know if not acting with full force today is going to doom us in a few decades or if we’ll be ok with waiting a few more years to act with full force. I’d rather err on the side of acting sooner just in case.

Nobody on this forum that I’m aware of disagrees with you on any of this.

Like a massive homo sapiens die off?

That would help stabilize the temperature for sure.

The fact that carbon has been higher and temps have been hotter doesn’t matter a whole lot because of the speed with which things are changing. Presumably those temps and carbon concentrations were built up over millions of years. This time it’s barely hundreds.

Still I’m fairly optimistic that we turn this thing around. Mostly because once it becomes a real problem humans are crazy inventive. There are probably going to be at least acceptable solutions for this.

That being said obviously the wildlife situation is going to be super weird after we get it all stable. We’ve really disrupted everything severely.