The scariest part of the slow trend of global warming is that maybe big positive feedback mechanisms could be literally hidden under our feets, pretty much ignored till now. Things could go wrong very fast, in ways that not even experts could had predicted.
I worry a lot about global warming, but I've never found that argument massively persuasive. The core worry you're getting at is that there might exist turning points, where a marginal unit of carbon will cause greater feedbacks and runaway global warming, at least until we stumble on another stable equilibrium.
If that were the case, though, we likely would have hit that turning point in the past. The Earth's temperature has been significantly warmer in recent memory, and if it were, we'd have already fallen past that turning point.
This isn't to say that there aren't currently positive feedback mechanism, nor that they're not big positive feedbacks, nor even that we won't stumble upon new positive feedbacks as we hit temperatures outside our historical memory. However, it's unlikely we'll ever hit a point where a unit of carbon causes a discontinuous change in average global temperatures.
It's an odd juxtaposition to see your comment about how this won't happen because it never happened before, right next to a comment about how it has happened before.
"Recent" is the key word, here. The PT event was 250 million years ago, and the Earth was a very different place then, including being significantly warmer.
The Holocene climatic optimum, on the other hand, was something like ten thousand years ago, and it explored temperatures that we're not close to (yet). If there were a life-ending loaded clathrate gun out there, the Earth would have hit it and triggered it then, not when we're experiencing relatively cooler temperatures now or in the near future. Unless it somehow got loaded in the ten thousand years since then, but no one thinks that.
ETA: To be clear, I'm not saying that climate change is fake, or that it's harmless because temperatures have been higher in the past. Those are orthogonal arguments to this (and they're bad arguments). This is just a statement about whether we're going to accidentally shock the globe into a radically different climate by triggering a methane clathrate gun.
TLDR: "Something melted, therefore global warming is the cause and mass extinction is the inevitable result" is such absurd logic its not worth wasting time debating it.
Have you ever seen fossilized sea creatures buried in rocks thousands of feet above and thousands of miles away from the sea? The planet has undergone massive climate and geological upheavals, and mass extinction events.
Human life is not really so important. Wether or not even we survive as a species is like a drop in the bucket of nothingness. Remenber there were fire-making, tool-making, upright walking species besides us that survived long enough to leave traces of their civilization.
No body owed them anything, survival least of all, and as a result they perished.
If you somehow would get a hole in the ground, it does not sound that far fetched to me it would get filled with water over time.
And of course other people have noticed this too. It is just, that many times the most vocal ones are the people who have a belief system/agenda to drive. How things really are, is not a matter of an opinion.
> Russian scientists have now spotted a total of seven craters, five of which are in the Yamal Peninsula. Two of those holes have since turned into lakes.
What I'm curious about is the mechanisms that might counteract global warming. The earth has cycled in the past between hot and cold periods, so there are obviously natural mechanisms that cause it to reverse as well.
Could we harness these mechanisms to keep the earth compatible with human habitation?
The earth has sometimes been cooled by volcanoes putting stuff in the atmosphere and that could be simulated by pumping sulphur dioxide though whether its a good idea is dubious. Funnily enough the present man made warming may actually help keep the earth compatible with human habitation as there are arguments it may head in to another ice age otherwise.
I think that this mechanism is mostly CO2 being slowly weathered out of the atmosphere and disposed of, mostly via limestone formation. This takes a very long time and is very slow, so it can only catch up if you stop pumping it out.
The colder oceans are notable natural CO2 absorbents, plus we have to mention the effects of life itself: photo-synthesizing plants and unicellular creatures. Like the historical ones that fixated enough carbon to create today's wast coal, oil and methane fields.
As I recall, there is a group of creatures that may did the first big wave of carbon fixation at the beginning of life, binding CO2 and releasing the important O2 that enabled the appearance of complex life forms, but I can't remember it's name.
Well, the main feedback mechanism that I can see being a major influence in the beginning chaos is that of albedo. In short, atmospheric warming causes more water vapour higher in the atmosphere, causing higher and denser clouds - which will reflect most light and energy and prevent it from reaching the surface. This in turn could cause snow and ice cover on the ground, due to lowered surface temperatures, which would feed further into a cooling system.
You'd expect to see this effect most prominently in continental rain shadow areas, particularly at altitude.
Frankly, the outcome is unknowable, there are too many variables, both known and unknown. The only element which does seem inevitable is that there will be major changes to human civilisation.
Oh - one thought I did have was blanketing the Arctic in artificial icebergs - just big white floating plastic platforms, millions of them.
haha, i have been saying people this thing to people for years. the climate is non-linear which means slight changes can result in bifurcations that are irreversible. When we lose all our mathematical models we lose our understanding and once that happens we are no different from cavemens who dont understand how fire works.
This gets brought up a lot but virtually no one in the extreme Warmist community takes this risk seriously, which is weird because a) it isn't entirely implausible and b) they talk about it a lot.
Yet we can tell they don't take it seriously, because they are adamantly opposed to nuclear power, which would defang coal, a major contributor to climate change.
One of the reasons otherwise reasonable people don't take AGW seriously is this kind of disconnect, in which the people who make the most noise about it are so clearly, obviously and transparently inconsistent between what they say they believe ("AGW runs a serious risk of creating civilization-ending events") and what they actually believe ("Global industrial capitalism is the root of all evil").
This is unfortunate, because AGW is a real problem, and should be addressed aggressively by both technological (nuclear, solar, etc) and political (carbon tax) means. But neither will happen until people start actually taking it seriously, instead of simply using it as a stick to beat some political hobby horse.
Denialists are little better, of course, but I honestly think it would be possible to get them mostly on side--and I have had some success in doing so--by sincere and consistent arguments that separate the science from the rabidly anti-capitalist, anti-industrial proposals for solution.
First of all, there's no such thing as the 'Warmist' community. If you start by looking for views you disagree with, confirmation bias will produce a view of the community that corresponds to your pre-conceived notions. In reality, many activists understand that nuclear baseload is a huge piece of any decarbonization strategy.
As to the methane issue, there are a number of scientists who think about it quite a bit -- and probably don't sleep much as a result. The problem is that two decades of intense lobbying and industry pressure have taught mainstream scientists to be incredibly conservative about their predictions. If the IPCC started including methane releases in their predictions, they'd be quickly torn to pieces for promoting speculative theories.
As for the nuclear stuff: if you're just looking for an excuse to not to care about climate change -- then go ahead and don't care about it! You're well aware that the main policy proposal on the table is a carbon tax of some sort and that such a policy would benefit both renewables and nuclear -- basically any technology that doesn't use the atmosphere as a waste dump.
If methane makes it into all of our water, can we defend against that? Can we filter it out? I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain.
It won't, methane doesn't "want" to mix with water anyway, at normal pressures and temperatures any dissolved methane will start to bubble out and float away.
> Can we filter it out?
It leaves on its own. Most of the time when you're concerned about methane in the water, it's because the water is being pumped up from underground where they were trapped together. The main risk there is explosions or fires if your equipment doesn't bleed off the methane safely.
> I imagine even if we could, other animals will still go extinct, which would disrupt our food chain.
Whoah, no, no no... you're thinking of something very different from methane, like perhaps heavy-metal contamination.
Methane isn't toxic unless there's a ridiculous amount pumped into a room. [Corrected: Odorless] Most animals generate some methane when digesting things.
TLDR: Nope, the issues with methane are going to be the climate and ozone-layer, not water-supplies.
Yep, pretty scary. Even scarier, if oceanic methane clathrates are destabilized, we're pretty much fucked i.e. kiss your hopes for controlling global warming goodbye:
I just gave some guy shit this morning for playing the old man card, but you do realize we had special effects before photoshop, right? A lot of what you can do in photoshop is actually the digital translation of the analogue process. Photoshop didn't make this possible, it just made it easier and faster.
Short version: "Siberia is warming. Permafrost thaws and spews methane, and blasts out a burst of highly flammable gas."
The consequences of that can include: Russia's economy being broken due to a main export literally vanishing into thin air. And worse: Green house gases getting into the atmosphere in vast amounts.
> The consequences of that can include: Russia's economy being broken due to a main export literally vanishing into thin air.
As far as I know, the methane from the permafrost is not commercially exploited. It's left there frozen, so this doesn't affect the Russian economy unless one of this "explosions" hits a building.
The currently mined gas deposits in Siberia are at least 600 meters below the ground level, normally deeper (generally at 1-2 km). The thickness of permafrost in most areas is a few ten meters, with the more cold areas reaching 300-450 meters, so there little to no overlap between the two.
When I read it I also wondered: "Why noone is pointing out that methane emissions also increase global warming?"
I have no idea ho much methane can be released, since I don't even know how much Russia is mining or anything like that...
But it sounds a lot (since in Ukraine crisis Russian gas is a big point), so if all that leaks out it would greatly accelerate global warming no? (thus releasing even more gas!)
>> Why noone is pointing out that methane emissions also increase global warming?
Methane produces a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2, so the obvious solution is to capture it and use it for fuel, which will convert it to CO2.
Landfills in the US are now esentially very large plastic bags.
The problem is when the trash decays it produces methane (and other gasses), and having flamable gas in an many acre bag is bad.. So there are vents and the methane is captured. This is captured and piped to burn off. There are claims of generating power but the amount I've seen is not significant.
Landfill gas generation is quite significant. In the U.S alone as of 2013, 621 LFG projects were operational producing 1,978 MW. Another 850 MW worth of projects are candidates.
"So is it old, buried organic (flora, fauna) matter thats causing the methane ?"
Yes, I believe so, though it could be still younger than the normal gas and oil fields (personal speculation).
1.) I think it may be possible, using a mix of infra and normal optical observations with a good algorithm to identify it on the images. Another but even smaller possibility would be the inspection of differences in the gravitational field * (though there may not be enough gas to be measurable this way).
But for either of these to be even remotely possible, we would need a good idea of what to seek, namely a not-yet-popped methane lens under the permafrost.
2.) Unlikely. Suppose if we manage to find some intact ones, tapping into those would be dangerous to a currently unknown extent, maybe even compared to the normal hazards of working with explosive and flammable hydrocarbons. Secondly, the amount of gas may not be enough to clear the costs.
In the interest of being sure (because I'm interested) I had to second-guess that water is a greenhouse gas. NOAA had an interesting statement on it, which I'll just quote:
"Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is why it is addressed here first. However, changes in its concentration is also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization."
And now I'm left wondering how to unpack that, politically AND scientifically. Ah, the luxuries of Saturday morning browsing.
If anyone is interested in learning more about permafrost methane, and a bit about clathrates as well, this paper[1] is a pretty good primer. I worked with the lead author over a summer around when he was publishing this a few years back. It's possible I can answer your questions, although I won't guarantee it. Clathrates/hydrates are a personal favorite of mine, even wrote up a short research paper in grad school on the possibility for their economic extraction.
considering how watched they are I doubt it, it could be likely to destabilization brought on by developing the area for natural gas usage. Perhaps they are causing fractures as other fuels taken out.
As for global warming or what not, its not like it wasn't warmer within periods of well documented history and we survived that just fine. It is more likely one volcano will do more than we think we do.
Interesting phenomena. Presumably this happens every time the average temperature rises above the melting point of the water and clathrates. Given that Methane is a pretty powerful greenhouse gas, it makes me curious what the mechanism is that converts a 'warm' earth into a 'frozen' earth.I think understanding that would help us understand what to expect as the temperature increases.
I find this process indescribably scary. It's understandable that the public is clueless, but can someone explain to me why the technologists aren't worried? Positive feedback would put us so far past the point of no return that earth will be unrecognizable.
Probably the fact that no positive feedbacks or 'tipping points' happened during the Holocene Climate Optimum, so it's fairly easy to figure out that this is your usual alarmist nonsense.
I'm pretty sure OP got downvoted because he asked a question he could have easily answered himself by looking up the definition of the word in question.
The definition of a crater has nothing to do with climate change.
I thought there was some "interesting" conspiracy theory thatI'm not aware of about how we are being bombarded from outer space but it's being covered up.
