Bye world
Hey guess what, we’ve passed the carbon tipping point. Permanently.
It’s a banner week for the end of the world, because we’ve officially pushed atmospheric carbon levels past their dreaded 400 parts per million. Permanently.
According to a blog post last Friday from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year—or ever again for the indefinite future.” Their findings are based on weekly observations of carbon dioxide at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, where climate scientists have been measuring CO2 levels since 1958.
What’s so terrifying about this number? For several years now, scientists have been warning us that if atmospheric carbon were allowed to surpass 400 parts per million, it would mark a serious “tipping point” into some unstoppable climate ramifications. In 2012, the Arctic was the first region on Earth to cross this red line. Three years later, for the first time since scientists had begun to record them, carbon levels remained above 400 parts per million for an entire month.
The unstoppable ramifications aren’t very pleasant.
Extinctions, food chain disruption, rising sea levels…
Ocean acidification
Considered a crucial barometer of environmental health, ocean acidity is already wiping out entire marine ecosystems. The planet’s oceans are constantly absorbing excess CO2, causing their pH to decrease, literally acidifying the water. As a result, vast expanses of life-sustaining coral, such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, are bleaching and dying. While coral polyps could still take hold and regrow into reefs, scientists anticipate that bleaching events will leave long-lasting marks on the face of ocean ecosystems.
Oops.
[…] Source: Bye world – Butterflies and Wheels […]
Bad, bad future looming.
A lot of people are in on this Chinese hoax.
Not unexpected. If we can slow it further adaptation is certainly possible. We’re human beings, it’s what we do.
Might have to rebuild ecosystems from scratch though… wish we were a bit better with CRISPR tech.
Correction: Not slowing further. If we can slow it down and stop it we can adapt to the new climate. We’re gonna need a lot of successful mutations to restore biodiversity though.
Blood Knight, do you have any idea of the complexity of what you’re suggesting? What we have so far is the ability to snap together Lego pieces (provided by nature) into increasingly interesting thingamajigs, some of which have medical and biological implications.
What you’re suggesting is the equivalent of using Legos to make a functional multigenerational starship to explore new worlds.
As the physicist once said, that’s not even wrong.
At this point it’s the best answer we’ve got. Either we take steps to deal with mass extinction or we end up with near zero biodiversity. I’m not even remotely suggesting that it’s practical, but we’re beyond the point of prevention and now have to concentrate on damage control.
George Monbiot is worth reading on this.
“Governments can either meet their international commitments or allow the prospecting and development of new fossil fuel reserves. They cannot do both.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracking-digging-drilling-paris-agreement-fossil-fuels
My own view is that the fossil carbon deposits should be held in reserve for the one use they have for which there is no substitute: as feedstock for the chemical industry, particularly for the production of road tar. Assuming we can make a switch to renewable energy sources in time, and all start driving electric off solar-fed mains, what are we going to drive them ON if not tar-macadam roads? Forget concrete, it emits a helluvalot of CO2 in its production.
Things to avoid include IMHO: fracking and coal-seam gas; carbon sequestration and storage – we as a species will need the CO2 to warm the planet as the next ice age (inevitably) approaches.
Footnote: Today the entire state of South Australia suffered an electricity supply shutdown due to freak storms blowing down power lines. The entire population of 1.7 million people was left without electric power for hours.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/29/south-australia-on-alert-again-as-adelaide-braces-for-strongest-storm-on-record
Actually the danger limit is probably closer to 350 ppm. As Bill McKibben and others have pointed out, to have any realistic chance of getting back to 350 ppm and limiting global warming to 2 °C (which is already way too high), humanity cannot afford to emit more than an additional 565 gigatons (actually, this was in 2012, so the number today is probably somewhat lower). But when you add up the amount of carbon that fossil fuel companies already keep in their reserves, the amount they are planning to emit, that they have already factored into their budgets, it’s 2,795 gigatons – almost five times more than the greatest amount compatible with limiting global warming to 2 °C. And of course they are still looking for more…
Given the magnitude of the problem, it’s easy to see how people might be tempted to give up. The problem with saying it’s too late is that it easily becomes just another excuse for inaction, for not even trying (“Well, it’s too late to do anything about it now anyway, so why bother”). What I fear is that we as a species will go directly from “It’s too early” to “It’s too late” without ever passing through the “The time to act is now” phase.
One thing that has strangely gone unmentioned: about a year ago, I read that there were now signs that methane is escaping from the melting permafrost. I sort of regarded that as the tipping point.
We’re living on borrowed time.
Bjarte @9:
That’s a very likely scenario. Climate is an extremely complex, nonlinear, dynamic system, and we shouldn’t expect it to change in smoothly linear and manageable ways when we are turning the parameter knobs up to values that they haven’t been at since before humankind evolved.
Yes. I was in a room that basically hit that moment emotionally all at once. An astronomy class, with a professor who pulled no punches, showing us people lighting ice on fire through methane bubbles trapped in it, telling us in 1000 years, Earth may be the new Venus, and about 75 people losing all sense of hope.
We knew the models that were under discussion in public policy were all too optimistic.
We knew how hard it was to get people to sacrifice convenience for sustainability.
Change was desperately needed, but not going to happen.
I suspect every young man in the room was considering a vasectomy– because hen you get how bad it is, the only thing you personally can do is not bring anyone into this world.
30 years ago, I was a primary school student and one of our projects was to write about the environment. I wrote about global warming and the greenhouse effect, and I remember feeling worried and hoping that it would get sorted out. So much for that hope.
I’m pretty misanthropic at the best of times, but I can only conclude from this that human brains are just not equipped to deal with the consequences of their own abilities. Threats that are too far in the future or physically far away don’t seem real, especially when our immediate environment continues as normal. The city I live in was badly affected by flooding last winter, and people did care about being flooded, obviously, but I’m not sure that anyone would’ve taken any notice if, 10 years ago, they’d been told ‘Restrict your carbon emissions and vote for a climate-friendly MP, or you’ll get flooded in 10 years.’
It would have taken some pretty brave and competent politicians across the world to take the scientific projections and say to people, right, this is what we’re doing, it’s for your own good, and people would’ve moaned and protested, but eventually there would’ve hopefully been an attitude change. But we don’t have brave and competent politicians, we have politicians in the pockets of rich corporations who get elected by telling people shhh, it’s ok, you don’t have to change anything about your lives.
We also have a media who support this narrative by constantly bombarding us with adverts for carbon-guzzling things and who present climate change as a matter of opinion. In the last climate change ‘debate’ I saw on the BBC, this year, there was a prominent climate-denier given loads of air time and I switched off in disgust. He just talked over everyone and the presenter let him. And then there was the news reporting of the floods where a guest said ‘I hope people will take climate change seriously now,’ and the presenter balked and said ‘Oh well that’s a divisive issue,’ and changed the subject.
A post-fact world indeed.
@iknklast
2012 – Methane bubbling up through shallow Arctic sea water off the East Siberian Arctic Shelf
Shakhova NE, Semiletov I, Salyuk A, Yusupov V, Kosmach D, Gustafsson O (2010): Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic shelf. Science, 327:1246-1250. Abstract
This appears to be an annual event now – though its exact significance is (of course) disputed. One thing is that, as the arctic warms considerably faster than the rest of the globe, we look to it as a kind of in-situ model of future events elsewhere. That… does not look good
There’s a more recent assessment of the ESAS here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41760559_Extensive_Methane_Venting_to_the_Atmosphere_from_Sediments_of_the_East_Siberian_Arctic_Shelf
Unfortunately that last one is pay walled.