"Gas hydrate is an ice-like substance formed by water and methane at depths of several hundred metres at the bottom of our oceans at high pressure and low temperatures. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it is estimated that methane frozen in these sediments constitute the largest organic carbon reservoir on Earth. The fact that methane gas has now started leaking out through gas hydrate dissociation is not good news for the climate."
Yikes like the clathrate gun that turned out to be nonsense, or yikes as in it's actually a threat? Not saying climate change isn't something to be worried about, but this article doesn't say if it'll release like 10% of yearly methane, or like 0.00001% and Ketzer's just trying to pump his publication count.
What I would really love to see is an indepedant website ranking all the threats. How bad is global shipping vs leaving your lights on? Or the clathrate gun vs burning oil fields? Or recycling your plastic vs throwing your plastic shit in the river in 3rd world countries?
Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%. Who's producing the rest? 'cause it's now obviously not most of the population of the world who get lectured about recycling, it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world.
> Like there's was a dip in CO2 emiisions during covid, but only like a 15%. Who's producing the rest?
While I agree very much about the absurd logic of trying to put the solutions to climate change on individuals, I am honestly perplexed that you don't seem to understand how all of your daily consumption contributes to climate change.
CO2 emissions doesn't just come from driving your car. If you ordered anything delivered from amazon that created CO2, if you live in a developing city your environment creates CO2, if you consume food that is grown non-locally or that uses fertilizer that also create CO2.
It's not just a "small number of companies" it's every company and every part of our modern life. Look around you and I can assure you that most of the things you see where shipped around the globe using ships powered by bunker fuel, they were made with materials gathered using a non-trivial amount of non-renewable energy.
Again, I agree that we can't expect that individually we'll all radically alter our lives and live like it's 1800, but it is essential to realize who much of your current way of live contributes to the enormous production of CO2.
The fact that things slowed down and we decreased emissions by some notable percentage but we suffered incredible economic consequences for this show just how unsustainable our entire way of life is.
It's nowhere near that simple though. CO2 is one big contributor, but not the only one. Methane is also a big contributor[1], and things like beef production are a big part of increased Methane emissions (by no means the only source).
People need to do and same goes for some of our food. As it relates to cows, there is research showing that the emissions they produce are dependent on their feed, and that methane in particular can be reduced through the use of additives such as seaweed. However, it's not clear that this particular strategy would be effective in the long-term, and we would need to produce a LOT of seaweed in order to have a significant impact.
Changing food production is possibly one of the easiest ways to attack climate change, as far as physical/biological feasibility goes (desires of tastebuds notwithstanding). Nobody trying to tackle food production suggests you should become malnourished for the sake of the climate.
Okay. So I'm a poor blue voting unskilled person in a rural blue district. What can I possibly do to have a positive measurable effect on global GHG emissions?
The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.
And you don't need to be a hardline child-free bicycle riding vegan hippy to make a difference.
Reductions in all those things will make a difference. Have fewer children. Choose to own a more efficient car and choose to drive it less. Reduce your long distance and international travel. Eat more plant based food and less meat and dairy. Eat more locally sourced and seasonal food. And there are other lesser impact things too: live in a smaller and better insulated house. Prioritise efficiency higher - choose to buy more efficient appliances. Use low energy lighting. Choose to live near where you work/play/socialise. Choose lower carbon impact hobbies and recreation, perhaps a sailing boat instead of a ski boat? Perhaps athletic sports instead of Nascar?
At a bigger picture level. Vote for the planet, appropriately prioritise climate change policies in your voting choices (and with two party politics, this can be difficult to do, don't vote in a facist just because they're a treehugger, but try to also not vote in your own self-interest if that candidate is deeply in bed with the fossil fuel lobby). Focus your career towards ecologically sound companies/industries where you can - actively seek and choose jobs with climate change in mind, if you have a choice between two roles consider carefully before jumping to the slightly higher paid fossil fuel job. When making or contributing to decisions at work, ensure consideration for climate impact is brought up where appropriate.
And make a noise. Be publicly unsatisfied, even if you have no solutions. Let other people know you care, even if you can't see any real way to make a difference yourself.
Can we stop with the don't have children advice. It's one step away from telling people to go kill themselves. People can choose to have children or not but it is not constructive to tell people to have or not have children. For most of us not having children will render saving the planet (as in making it habitable for humans) a meaningless exercise.
The impact of having a child in the first world is huge. You could live as close to a third world lower middle class lifestyle as possible and have one child.
The impact of immigration is even bigger. All first world nations have declining birth rates now and would reduce their population numbers substantially without immigration. Yet in many countries reach record population numbers on a yearly basis - because millions of immigrants keep pouring in.
I'd rather stop immigration before further driving our birth rates down and leaving world of the future to the low intelligence populations that are currently driving population growth on a global scale. The only ones following this "don't have children because of the climate" advice are those intelligent enough to do so. The whole thing is completely dysgenic in its nature.
It's about having less children, not "not having children".
The world isn't black and white.
Having more children than we need is why we're in this whole mess to begin with. If people stuck to having 2-3 kids instead of 4-5, we'd have a much longer runway to transition to renewables, including building up storage capacity.
Instead, we're scrambling and calling transitioning from coal to natural gas a success, when it's just changing 1 fossil fuel for another, while the world is burning (quite literally, in some parts) around us.
I do not have any children, by choice - out of selfishness more than environmental concerns if I’m being brutally honest with myself.
But I care deeply about the mess we’re leaving for my nieces and nephew, and for many of my friend’s children.
And, quite frankly, saying “not fucking up a planet is a meaningless exercise” if it doesn’t happen to allow _your_ precious DNA to survive? That’s not the sort of awful person I’d admit to being in public...
And there's zero chance of systemic/legal changes without the voting public making it clear (by their individual actions and choices) that it matters to them.
Sea Shepherd, for example, are crazy far-end-of-the-bell-curve outliers. In my mind they're one of the ecological equivalents of RMS. Actions and choices that go way beyond what most people would consider sensible or necessary, but who're critically important for the movements they represent, because the "other side" has much worse and many more outliers in the "wrong direction". Without the work RMS has done over decades and the example he's set - flawed as he is - we could not have open source in the position it is today.
Sea Shepherd lobbing jars putrecene onto the decks of Japanese whaling "research" ships in the middle of the ocean is insane. But seeing suburban moms wearing Sea Shepherd tshirts in shopping malls and parks and political protests has without doubt made political candidates think differently.
Individual changes aren't enough, but they're necessary. Pushing for systemic change and laws forcing others to change their lives but not wanting to voluntarily make changes in yours just looks like hypocrisy.
These kinds of guidelines for abstinence all add up to an approximation for "don't exist". People persuaded into this lifestyle will have a negligible effect on the climate, because the vast majority of people will keep living their lives in a way that they seek enjoyment and fulfilment, rather than as an exercise in minimising their impact on the climate.
It's okay for the small minority of motivated people to forgo enjoyment in pursuit of this ideal, but just don't be mistaken into believing that it will have a measurable effect.
The only real solution is to make natural human behaviour non-CO2-emitting.
> The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.
You can have a still vastly bigger effect by affecting the footprint of others.
Re GP context, even with a low income you might get a lot done in activism / community organising, it might also make you feel more fulfilled as you are fighting to save the planet.
> The highest impact things an individual can do, roughly in order are: Don't have children. Don't own a car. Don't fly internationally. Don't eat meat. Don't eat dairy. Don't eat imported food.
Living in a small and well-insulated flat should also make a sizeable impact.
Put a little money in your car, if you can. Keep it running well, it'll use less gas. Making a new car makes a ton of carbon. Getting every last mile out of what you got helps everyone.
Look for stuff that will last forever. A good set of boots you oil will last a long, long time. You can get them resoled. Iron skillets are super cheap and will outlast you. The stupid handle will fall off of a cheap skillet.
The number one thing is make the most of what you got. Stuff wears out. Next time around, look for stuff that'll last longer. Look for second hand stuff that can be repaired. there's a lot of great old tools out there that'll give years of service.
(this is basically just the first two parts of reduce, reuse, and recycle. the first two have the biggest impact.)
Okay. I already do this to the best of my ability and have been for my adult life because I perform rudimentary cost benefit analysis and research my options for every possible purchase. While there are other steps I could take I lack the time, land, capital, or skills to install hydro/geo/thermal power at my house, or upgrade my homes perfectly average weatherization to class leading options.
I don't think my efforts have made any measurable impact on the climate, but I always want to make sure I'm not missing a step.
I think it's beginning to become clear that consumers cannot suffer climate change away and change must be forced upon the worst offenders first. Not taking responsibility off of myself, but recognizing that, despite my votes against Congress members that support, the military industrial complex, is still one of the worst polluters globally.
I think there's two related but different fights there.
The "worst offenders" are rich and powerful, and will argue very effectively and brutally to congress that they should be allowed to continue to get richer and more powerful. That's the nature of power. That's a political problem and needs political solutions.
But...
Their arguments are _so_ much more powerful when they can look at the congress members and say "No one cares anyway! Look at all the voters buying SUVs instead of hybrids or electrics! Look at them all flying to Vegas and Paris and Bankok every year! Look at them not installing solar power. They! Dont! Care! The VOTERS don't care!!! (Oh, and speaking of flying to Paris, here's 4 first class tickets, enjoy...)"
So, I think you're saying a couple of things. 1) what can you personally do to make a globally detectable change. I can't really think of anything. I can't think of a single person who contributes in a meaningful way to climate change. Atlas is a myth. there is no person holding the world on their shoulders. So, like, don't sweat it.
I want to highlight durability and repairability over disposability. I wasn't super explicit about it, so let me say it now. Cheap disposable shit sucks. Costs a lot to make, but it's cheaper than something that's durable, resealable, repairable. I think that there is a huge part of the problem. As a concrete example, my grandma had the same tv for like 40 years, and the cabinet wound up turning into something else for one of my cousins. I'm looking at a big TV, and I'm not super sure I'll be able to plug it into anything in 10 years, if it even still works. I like it, I don't regret my choice, but I really didn't have the option for a full spectrum cost/benefit. They just don't make things like that that will probably work in 50 years.
2) I'm not sure what you mean about consumers suffering climate change. Here's another (perhaps silly example) I got an original iPhone. I'd still use that if it was feasible. I mean, I've got it in a drawer, I could probably figure it out, but the whole system avoids any longevity or resale value. I think it wouldn't take too much effort to shift just a little bit to longevity. I have a fancy pants phone, it's stupid. I didn't have a choice about getting a new phone cause the old one broke. The old one shouldn't have broken, it should have been a lot easier to find someone's hand me down. Right now that's like taking some rando from craigslist cash. ugh.
3) I have complicated thoughts about the military. I absolutely believe the US military is one of the worst offenders. The US military was also one of the first to integrate with respect to race, and later with respect to gender.
I think you've identified a real opportunity, that's a place that could absolutely lead the way. Finding the political will do actually do something is pretty tough. all the old arguments will come out - this endangers the safety of the nation.
-- final edit --
This is tasteless, I'll honor it. Was perhaps trying to appear committed, but it's more of an arrogant ass thing to close with.
--
Tell you what though, if you think you can fix it, I'll donate $100 to your campaign, or charity. my username at gmail. ping me and I'll honor my claim.
-- terms and conditions edit --
it's gotta be you. not, of your choice. You. I might also need a link to this to remember how silly I am from time to time.
1. Would require legal changes. Until it is less profitable to make cheap junk that doesn't last and isn't repairable companies will not stop ravaging the environment in their reckless pursuit of profit. Consumers are trapped by this. In the exceptionally rare case where a company does manufacturer their products to be durable and repairable they tend to be exceptionally expensive niche items.
2. What I mean is this. Consumers cannot shop and boycott their way out of climate change. Reusable grocery bags/straws may give the consumer a hit of dopamine but these actions amount to little more than virtue signaling in terms of the effect they have on the environment. When no company offers a compromise free environmentally friendly durable and repairable alternative in any category consumers are trapped. This is the case with most products, and is why consumers cannot sacrifice (money, time, convenience) their way out of climate change.
3. Okay? Back to square one. That's the same sort of rhetoric we get about shuttering coal mines.
4. If I think of a way to solve global warming for $100 I'll definitely call on you to pay up.
Even if everyone in the world did everything that you're saying here would it be enough to have a positive measurable effect on the total co2 in the atmosphere?
If everyone in the world chose fuel efficient vehicles and carpooled or used mass transit appropriately, yes, that would have a measurable long run effect. It wouldn't be enough on its own to completely solve the problem but it would be progress.
If enough people (not even everyone, just enough that the single digit percent voting majority a lot of politicians have in their electorates looks potentially like it could swing towards environmentalism), it'd send a message with a huge multiplier potential. Individual actions are important, because corporate and government change will not happen from the top down, it _has_ to be pushed from the bottom up.
Yawn. Excusing your abdication of personal duty to future generations through hand-wavey ideology.
It’s ok for previous generations to pay for the roads that allow you to travel and sell your wares or skills but a tax on your pollution to stave off mass re-settling of people in your lifetime would violate your sensibilities.
The answer to what is no? I don't think anyone asked you a question.
Many of the most fuel efficient vehicles are relatively cheaper than the less fuel efficient ones. For example, luxury sedans and sports cars tend to be less efficient than economy sedans, but economy sedans are (perhaps obviously from the name) cheaper. So by doing the environmentally efficient thing, you would actually be saving money, not spending more.
Yes, the money you spend has a pretty strong correlation with your environmental impact. I remember a presentation from Jeffrey Sachs that put a sustainable level of spending at about $10,000 USD per person. There are no Teslas on a green planet.
I have the impression that average spending is about $10K per person, for the whole world. I don't have any opinion about whether that's sustainable, but I don't think there's any reason why sustainability requires equality of consumption.
Given that it was for a US audience I assumed it was adjusted for purchasing parity. After all the main point of the talk was the problem is real and caused by excess consumption.
It is an interesting point about equality given that the problem really does originate from the richer parts of the world. A subsistence farmer in Africa is going to have a carbon footprint several orders of magnitude smaller than the typical SV inhabitant.
Even now poorer countries are arguing that they should be able to increase their emissions because they haven't created the problem. At the same time politicians in the richer part of the world are terrified of falling living standards. Because of this I doubt we can fix it in time but if we did it would probably look somewhat socialistic.
In addition to talking to local representatives, you could also not have kids, refrain from meat, and be conservative about air travel.
But ultimately, we are all tied in this together. It might be a weird irony that many of the same people on HN who are concerned about climate change work for companies that look to optimize consumption. Not pointing fingers, just saying... we probably need serious government interference to hey things under control. But nobody (including me) wants that.
> we probably need serious government interference
We should allocate tax money to field an army of Federal Inspectors. I'm sure this already exists somewhat on a smaller scale for EPA audits (though the EPA has been recently stripped of many resources and responsibility by the current administration).
It may not be necessary to give an Inspector the power to levy fines, because his/her purpose would be to discreetly patrol different cities talking to people about how they live their lives, while observing behavior and local conditions. This would create accountability and be a more personal way to collect data about public sentiment.
It could also create ripples in local conversation - "I talked to a G-woman today! She walked by while I was watering the garden and asked how my day was going and asked what I had for lunch - she says she's reducing meat consumption even though she loves the taste. I told her that I've been trying to sort my trash and she said 'keep up the good work'!. She was a very nice, pretty lady!"
We do not want to impose "enforcement" as much as we want to develop a polite, cordial federal presence (in the flesh) that sets a good example in order to sculpt citizen habits throughout the nation. It is the presence of authority without the fear of enforcement. It also sets a precedent ("wow, they are serious about this!").
A very recent "example" on front page Reddit today:
I'm not sure if this has happened before, but I believe it is an example of things to come. Public health is a security issue - I can understand Australian law enforcement responding [in the flesh] to local social media activity (anti-lockdown protest organization attempt). However, in the video it seems they are there to enforce, with a house warrant and handcuffs. A slap on the wrist can steer a citizen in the proper direction, but it can also generate resentment. I wouldn't want an "EPA Accountability Agent" to ever be resented. We would want them to exist as a strong, caring, curious, and relatable presence.
We need this kind of accountability now that the internet has ironically divided many people on some fundamentals. There's so much information out there and not enough naturally instilled intuition as to what is worth paying attention to.
Love your username, by the way. Long-term one day I'd like to be the warden of a piece of land and set up a such a diverse permaculture that eventually when I'm hungry, I would just go out to "gather" what I need fresh off the stalk.
Small actions that are inconsequential when considered as single event add up to big changes when 1% or 10% of people do them.
This goes for positive or negative actions. It only takes a small fraction of people littering to make somewhere nice into a trash heap. They say eating less beef is good for the environment but that doesn’t mean you have to become a vegetarian immediately. If you eat 1/3 less meat, that could be just by skipping meat in a meal or two each week or eating slightly smaller portions, there’s likely many people like you. Not everyone can or will become vegetarian but by making the change to eat a bit less meat all every three people like you are creating a vegetarian equivalent.
One big change is realizing that while everyone is unique, countless people will be making similar decisions at any given moment.
Nothing really. You can vote for a carbon tax or some cap and trade system but that's not going to be immediately measurable. If you're an individual poor person you are insignificant. You have no leverage so you can't increase impact easily and you have low consumption anyway so no lifestyle change will matter.
Are you referring to a specific clathrate gun or the concept in general? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis summarizes a lot of research on this subject and doesn't give me the impression that it's nonsense or "debunked". Personally, I find it worrisome.
The problem with that criticism is that the payoff function is absurdly nonlinear. Think of it in terms of expected values: because the outcome at one end of those error bars is so severe, it's rational to treat the "gun" part as true until it's shown not to be.
I'm not criticizing the hypothesis, simply pointing out it's not well understood.
But it is not true that the precautionary principle applies here regardless of the risk.
There is a cost to avoiding the behaviors that raise the possibility of run away methane release; carbon based energy was absolutely necessary to get out science/industry to the point we can look for alternatives.
If we muddled around in the pre-industrial age in perpetuity, eventually we'd get wiped out by some large event (astroid, super volcano, ice age etc). So the risk is worth it to a point since the cost of the alternative is equally high.
We're not in that situation, because we've already made the choice not to muddle about pre-industrially.
But even so, that argument is flawed: we're still at risk of getting wiped out by all the same extreme natural phenomena as we were 500 years ago, only we've added some new ones of our own: nuclear holocaust, clathrate guns, runaway warming of some other cause immediately spring to mind. Probabilistically we're worse off now than we were then, just because of the additional ways things can go wrong.
We don't have the choice to stay pre-industrial. That's off the table. We do hopefully still have the choice to avoid a scenario that drops us irrecoverably back to pre-agricultural.
>it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world.
Assuming that you're right about a small number of companies producing most of the pollution, and a small proportion of people "hoarding wealth" what does the one have to do with another? If all the oil and coal companies had stock that was distributed perfectly evenly, I don't see how it would necessarily change pollution.
> it's obviously a small number of companies, which I think most of us would suspect probably has a high intersection with the small number of people hoarding wealth in the world.
Do you think the rich just buy coal mines and set them on fire?
Or do you mean all the citizens of Europeans and North American, in which case yes. We 1% with all the wealth are the ones emitting CO2 while we wait for the worlds poor to catch up, who get to have a small footprint by letting kids die of diarrhoea and stuff.
You stared well, of course the Clathrate gun is made up like almost everything else in the global warming lore, but then you started your own fan fiction.
Some people in my country are very negative about immigrants. 'They should stay in their own country'.
But I really believe the world is going to be different in 10 years from now. And it is very likely a lot of people must migrate to other places because conditions become unlivable.
Some point that is not very clear if we read the article shallowly: the methane is not yet leaked to the ocean's surface, for now it is just melted, then dissolved into the water, and microorganisms are converting it to CO2, which adds a huge new source of CO2 for our already overloaded system.
I wonder how far away in the future is the point where the methane would actually raise quicker than bacteria are able to process it.
I wonder if there is potential for enough methane hydrate turning gaseous that it drives a top to bottom current, bringing warm surface water to greater depths and thus creating a runaway effect where the ocean would seem to be boiling violently from all the methane being released. I had a nightmare about this the other day after seeing the tundra pits, no idea if this is remotely feasible
I think such a runaway effect might be more likely than people think. Such places could also still be deceptively quiet on the surface if it's only exchanging water-dissolved methane. It could turn boiling fast and sink ships due to lack of surface tension and rapid decrease in average water density.
The Swarm by Schätzing depicted a scenario like this, concluding in the runaway being fast enough to eventually cause the clathrate to detonate, causing a large scale tsunami in the north sea of Europe.
This mechanism and permafrost melt are two of the main feedback loops associated with non-anthropogenic warming. Whether they're properly accounted for in climate models is a key question.
The IPCC reports account for a lot of things but for political reasons have been conservative in many of their estimates because certain countries are not fond of the implications of our sustainable lifestyle.
That sounds unfortunate, to say it lightly. So an actual model would predict almost immediate doom? Is there any climate model taking these things into account?
If you include all known positive and negative feedback loops we're talking about human extinction within a couple decades. Furthermore, most of what the public thinks is the key leverage points of climate change generally turn out to be something else. Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use. All other natural feedback loops then end up being force multipliers.
> Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use.
No it isn't, it's around (under, really) 10%. CO2 from US transportation alone is 6.7 billion tonnes, vs 4.8 for all tropical deforestation (which is the place land use for livestock takes place). It is a common misconception that land use or agriculture are significant drivers of climate change. They are of course tremendously damaging in their own particular ways (eg water/runoff/biodiversity), but globally energy, and fairly close behind it transportation, are by far the largest causes of increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Do we have historic evidence of runaway methane induced warming? It seems crazy that we are seeing these effects, but have nothing(?) in the geological records of these cataclysmic events
Yes we do, but it's only a hypothesis. This was part of my PhD dissertation and one of my committee members is the world's expert on this topic. His name is Gerald (Jerry) Dickens. We believe this happened approximately 55 million years ago during an event called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), an extreme global warming event. I've published a couple papers on this topic.
The way this works is, we run a computer model and try to come up with a scenario which matches the observations from that time period the best. And seems like the extreme warning that happened during the PETM was likely due to methane hydrate dissociation. I can link a few scientific papers if anyone is interested.
In short, there was no major extinction (nothing like what happened during the end-Permian), some slow adopting benthic (deep ocean species) went extinct, however. The reason there was no major extinction was mostly due to the fact that the warming happened over a span of thousands of years. What we are doing to earth today is happening at a rate at least an order of magnitude faster than during the PETM (see the nature geoscience article I linked below), likely even faster. That wikipedia page has a good summary but here is Jerry's detailed scientific paper on this topic:
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:469826/FULLTEXT0...
It was really warm, not sure on the exact number off the top of my head but at least 10-15 degrees C warmer in high latitudes than today. It was essentially an ice free world. And during the PETM event itself, the temperatures rose another 5 to 8 degrees C:
https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/385777/Ex...
I have seen models (and there was an article recently) how relatively small increase in temperature can reduce clod cover, reducing albedo and introducing another source of positive feedback and one that acts very fast.
Yes, there are likely many tipping points, some which we are aware of, and possibly some that we cannot even predict, which could cause a positive feedback. Once the tipping point is reached, the earth-system response might be highly non-linear, kind of scary to think about.
We already have a known source of methane emissions that is ever increasing: cattle. Cows and swine account for several metric tons of emissions every year, factory farming accounting for most of it. Reducing this is in most people's control.
The emissions from grains etc add up to roughly as much overall- you don't eat the entire plant and it either rots or gets fed to cows. Obviously reducing emissions in our food industry is a huge win- eliminating red meat would be awesome. It's nowhere near good enough. Fossil fuels are 30x more important, easily.
OK, so there are some positive feedback loops for global warming. As temperature rises, that causes other effects that in turn warms the climate even more.
But I can't see any fundamental reason that such side effects should add to the warming. It seems just as likely that they would counteract it. It's not like there is any plan behind it. In Physics, whatever happens happens.
So... I wonder if there is also a set of counteracting global warming side effects that don't get reported much, since that isn't scary? Or is there some fundamental reinforcement mechanism here that I'm not seeing?
There are but they operate over really long time periods, tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The balance is naturally restored through an increase in weathering rates (which are a function of of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere). The rate at which we are pumping carbon is unprecedented for at least the past 66 million years. There's no natural mechanism which could restore the balance fast enough. I have a PhD on this topic, I investigated climate change and climate evolution in deep geological times in order to find a proxy to what's happening today. The closest thing that ever happened in the past 66 million years is the PETM (see my other comments in this thread). I'll be glad to any questions that you might have.
The biggest negative feedback loop I am aware of is clouds. Higher temp, more moisture in the air, more clouds, greater reflection of incoming light (and greater retention of heat, so not a clear negative loop in all scenarios). However, as far as I can tell, clouds are a lot easier to model than the positive feed back loops we know/suspect, albedo decrease, clathrate guns, peat breakdown, etc. Thus, we are in a situation, where negative feedback loops seem well accounted for and there are a few potentially catastrophic, but perfectly plausible, positive feedback loops that are too difficult to properly assess. It is scary.
Are you sure clouds actually reduce warming? My understanding was that since they retain heat through the night, but only reflect light in the day, they actually exacerbate warming. That's why it's thought that airplane contrails contribute to warming, since they increase cloud cover. Could be wrong though; I don't recall where I read that exactly.
There's no reason that feedbacks must be positive in principle. Regardless, though, as the earth system wanders farther from its most recent stable state (the Holocene equilibrium), its behavior is likely to continue to become more chaotic and difficult to predict. That's not good for humans no matter whether it involves warming or cooling.
To my knowledge the reinforcement mechanisms we are aware of do tend to be positive, though, hence the focus on warming.
(disclaimer: I know you're joking, sorry to answer so seriously ^^)
The fact it is released does not mean that it is captured (by humans). Actually, any project to capture all of methane clathrate (because capturing all of it is the only way to preventing it melting and leaking) would be so titanic, really impossible, or very very difficult.
Yes we agree, Musk will never run out of methane. But the Earth will quickly run out of capacity to process it when it's released, accelerating the greenhouse effect, that's the real limiting factor.
An impossibly titanic project, sure. But as long as we are burning hydrocarbons that would have happily stayed in the ground ever after, switching all that combustion to hydrocarbons that would escape one way or the other anyways would be a major win.
If the clathrates are really massively destabilized with raising temperatures, no existing microorganisms could possibly stop the huge mega-bubbles of methane that would raise bursting to the ocean surface.
Microorganisms could very well be useful, but only if the process stays slow. But in this case, maybe there are already enough of them naturally.
Yes. I must apologize, my poor English grammar made my comment unclear: I was wondering, in case of releases of methane orders of magnitude larger and quicker than they are now, how microorganisms could possibly stop large bubbles on their way. It is clearly not the case right now.
Not the original commenter, but I think the point of the comment is different from your interpretation. Typically "ocean fertilization" refers to the concept of seeding the ocean with iron and other nutrients to encourage blooming of oxygen generating (CO2 consuming) photosynthetic microorganisms. The idea is not to literally consume the rising bubble as it boils off the ocean floor, but to slow down/reverse global warming in general by reducing atmospheric CO2.
Hmm... plastic or airplane pollution is just enough to create pollution problems, but I think they it's way too small to be a suitable vector for this kind of large scale delivery.
Micro-plastics are plentiful in the oceans in particular because they degrade very slowly, whereas we want algal bloom to quickly devour the iron, so that would not match.
I appreciate the funny idea though! ^^ To turn these calamities into features!
I am not so sure about that, I think highly concentrated iron is less productive for carbon sequestration than less concentrated iron. In addition because the flow of plastic is constant it may lead to semi-permanent algae rather than a boom and bust of an algae bloom.
The slow degradation of plastics is actually a feature in that sense, as a single piece of plastic will fertilize a larger area of the ocean.
It may also lead to algae growing on the plastic and then dying, leading it to sink and no longer represent a threat to wildlife.
An efficient delivery mechanism would be throwing biodegradable mineral-coated micro-rafts into warm surface marine currents. This way a few distribution points on the planet may suffice.
I think the suggestion was to fertilize the oceans with large quantities of iron to create massive microorganism blooms to sequester CO2, not to somehow "block the clathrate gun" as it were.
Atmospheric methane removal seems doable, maybe a prototype for CO2 removal. It's easier because it doesn't have to be buried: it could just be burned to convert to CO2 with a much smaller warming impact.
Excess atmospheric CO2 still causes major problems with human cognition and building ventilation.
At about 800ppm there are measurable falls in human cognitive performance. Might not happen outside for a while, but the increase to the outdoor level makes ventilation much more difficult.
"Gas hydrate is an ice-like substance formed by water and methane at depths of several hundred metres at the bottom of our oceans at high pressure and low temperatures. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it is estimated that methane frozen in these sediments constitute the largest organic carbon reservoir on Earth. The fact that methane gas has now started leaking out through gas hydrate dissociation is not good news for the climate."