Until recently I would wring my hands and feel sad for a situation I couldn't change.
Several months ago, though, I joined the Citizen's Climate Lobby, which is building political will for a carbon tax and dividend (the only truly market-based approach to limiting green house gas emissions). I know that warming has happened and will happen due to past emissions. But at this point I feel I'm working to avoid the most disastrous scenarios by limiting future emissions.
I have been inspired by my involvement with this organization, and I encourage other concerned Hacker Newsers to consider joining.
CCL is a great organization. I joined after the election because I was really upset and could either mope or get involved with something important to me. I like the fact that CCL has a non-partisan or bi-partisan proposal and that it sincerely works both sides of the aisle. Our country has societal problems and it's got political problems. CCL is trying to address them both.
> carbon tax and dividend (the only truly market-based approach to limiting green house gas emissions)
I always heard cap-and-trade described as a market-based approach (by people who talk about the actual policy instead of just trying to vacuously demonize it). Can you briefly explain (or link to a good argument) how it fails to live up to that description?
There is really no cause for optimism. The fact is that all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere stays there for at least ten thousand years, and we are increasing our output of CO2. So actually, the problem is getting much worse and is likely to remain bad for many thousands of years.
It is entirely possible to destroy the fragile earth, and humans are doing exactly that. There is no reason that it has to have a happy ending.
This is a nice notion, but ignores the feedback cycles which have already been set in motion - at this point, reducing our emissions to zero may provide little benefit, as as the Arctic and Antarctic thaw, relict methane is being emitted at an alarming rate, wildfires are becoming far more frequent globally, and oceans are no longer functioning terribly well as carbon sinks, further pushing emissions.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I fear we're already past the point of no return for catastrophic climate change.
I believe the higher levels of CO2 are a concern and we should do what we can to reduce them. Yet, the points you make are not obvious to me. Do you have reference to literature that I could read.
This article [1] in the journal Limnology and Oceanography (and others) indicates to me that we don't understand the effect of climate change on methane emissions from the Arctic and Antarctic seabed. Are emissions going up or down?
Wildfires in the western US are increasing, but we've changed the way we manage forests and forest fires in the west. The resulting accumulation of brush in forests (for one reason because we aggressively put out even small fires to protect encroaching development) makes big fires more likely. Furthermore on the scale of centuries, as long as the forests stand they will simply recycle CO2 by absorbing it as trees grow and by releasing it when they die (either through rotting and decay or by burning).
As far as the oceans not acting as CO2, the recent literature that I've read says that they are acting as CO2 sinks. The first two sentences of the abstract from a Feb. 2017 paper in Nature[2] are:
"The ocean is the largest sink for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2), having absorbed roughly 40 per cent of CO2 emissions since the beginning of the industrial era. Recent data show that oceanic CO2 uptake rates have been growing over the past decade reversing a trend of stagnant or declining carbon uptake during the 1990s"
Not sure why you're being down-voted -- feedback is an incredibly important process that surprisingly few software engineers seem to be exposed to.
In particular, there are multiple attractor states where the planet's temperature can maintain an approximate equilibrium for long periods of time -- one of these is just below our current mean temperature, and the next one up is thought to be about 10 degrees Celsius warmer, closer to the temperature experienced during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. Then of course there are ice ages, which, if aided by low CO2 levels, can result in the extreme low temperature of a "Snowball Earth."
We are likely out of the equilibrium of our interglacial and in the beginning stages of a positive feedback loop that will continue increasing the planet's temperature until most of Earth's ice is melted and deserts expand in the low-mid latitudes, at which point blackbody radiation will offset the decreased albedo from lower ice levels.
There are more complex, unpredictable dynamics at play as well that may serve as negative feedback. For example, less Arctic sea ice is predicted to result in more snow in the far north due to increased evaporation, which may serve to build up glaciers on land.
Another factor is climate lag, also called climate inertia. There is a delay of a couple of decades between emissions and temperature change. The thing is we have emitted more in the past decades than the previous 150 years before that.
So even if a miracle happened and we got to zero emissions there are still self sustaining feedbacks and a monstrous wave of warming coming at us.
Our only hope really are extreme negative emissions, but I feel we won't even be able to make it to zero emissions.
Realistically, extreme negative emissions are a practical impossibility. Zero emissions are as well.
We still have an opportunity to reduce the extent of the damage. Major climate change is likely inevitable at this point as, realistically, the modest measures taken to date are insufficiently binding to be effective.
I don't think we've past the point of no return, yet, but we will certainly do so at some point given the real cost of taking action appears to grow faster than the political will to take action.
[+] [-] dietdrb|8 years ago|reply
Several months ago, though, I joined the Citizen's Climate Lobby, which is building political will for a carbon tax and dividend (the only truly market-based approach to limiting green house gas emissions). I know that warming has happened and will happen due to past emissions. But at this point I feel I'm working to avoid the most disastrous scenarios by limiting future emissions.
I have been inspired by my involvement with this organization, and I encourage other concerned Hacker Newsers to consider joining.
citizensclimatelobby.org
[+] [-] nngrey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|8 years ago|reply
I always heard cap-and-trade described as a market-based approach (by people who talk about the actual policy instead of just trying to vacuously demonize it). Can you briefly explain (or link to a good argument) how it fails to live up to that description?
[+] [-] hnaparst|8 years ago|reply
It is entirely possible to destroy the fragile earth, and humans are doing exactly that. There is no reason that it has to have a happy ending.
[+] [-] zzalpha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe_again|8 years ago|reply
I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I fear we're already past the point of no return for catastrophic climate change.
[+] [-] todd8|8 years ago|reply
This article [1] in the journal Limnology and Oceanography (and others) indicates to me that we don't understand the effect of climate change on methane emissions from the Arctic and Antarctic seabed. Are emissions going up or down?
Wildfires in the western US are increasing, but we've changed the way we manage forests and forest fires in the west. The resulting accumulation of brush in forests (for one reason because we aggressively put out even small fires to protect encroaching development) makes big fires more likely. Furthermore on the scale of centuries, as long as the forests stand they will simply recycle CO2 by absorbing it as trees grow and by releasing it when they die (either through rotting and decay or by burning).
As far as the oceans not acting as CO2, the recent literature that I've read says that they are acting as CO2 sinks. The first two sentences of the abstract from a Feb. 2017 paper in Nature[2] are:
"The ocean is the largest sink for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2), having absorbed roughly 40 per cent of CO2 emissions since the beginning of the industrial era. Recent data show that oceanic CO2 uptake rates have been growing over the past decade reversing a trend of stagnant or declining carbon uptake during the 1990s"
[1] Limnology and Oceanography. Effects of climate change on methane emissions from seafloor sediments in the Arctic Ocean: A review, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lno.10307/full
[2] Nature. Recent increase in oceanic carbon uptake driven by weaker upper-ocean overturning. https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v542/n7640/abs/nature2...
[+] [-] lend000|8 years ago|reply
In particular, there are multiple attractor states where the planet's temperature can maintain an approximate equilibrium for long periods of time -- one of these is just below our current mean temperature, and the next one up is thought to be about 10 degrees Celsius warmer, closer to the temperature experienced during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. Then of course there are ice ages, which, if aided by low CO2 levels, can result in the extreme low temperature of a "Snowball Earth."
We are likely out of the equilibrium of our interglacial and in the beginning stages of a positive feedback loop that will continue increasing the planet's temperature until most of Earth's ice is melted and deserts expand in the low-mid latitudes, at which point blackbody radiation will offset the decreased albedo from lower ice levels.
There are more complex, unpredictable dynamics at play as well that may serve as negative feedback. For example, less Arctic sea ice is predicted to result in more snow in the far north due to increased evaporation, which may serve to build up glaciers on land.
[+] [-] pier25|8 years ago|reply
Another factor is climate lag, also called climate inertia. There is a delay of a couple of decades between emissions and temperature change. The thing is we have emitted more in the past decades than the previous 150 years before that.
So even if a miracle happened and we got to zero emissions there are still self sustaining feedbacks and a monstrous wave of warming coming at us.
Our only hope really are extreme negative emissions, but I feel we won't even be able to make it to zero emissions.
[+] [-] nonbel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prodmerc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fweespeech|8 years ago|reply
We still have an opportunity to reduce the extent of the damage. Major climate change is likely inevitable at this point as, realistically, the modest measures taken to date are insufficiently binding to be effective.
I don't think we've past the point of no return, yet, but we will certainly do so at some point given the real cost of taking action appears to grow faster than the political will to take action.