Global warming strikes again...

[Lexicus]

Interesting article I ran into
https://www.theatlantic.com/science...hs-only-civilization/557180/?utm_source=atlfb

A bit to think about when people say the change is easily manageable and other nonsense:

Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.

 

[onejayhawk]

What's interesting to me is that the PETM was habitable. Civilization would look very different, but it could exist at the height of the warming. So, you have a valid point when you say that change is manageable, it just isn't the one you tried to make.

J

 

[Berzerker]

https://www.investors.com/politics/...ange-global-warming-earth-cooling-media-bias/

can that be right?

a 1/2 degree C drop in global temps the last 2 years?

From February 2016 to February 2018, "global average temperatures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius." That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century.

 

[FriendlyFire]

https://www.investors.com/politics/...ange-global-warming-earth-cooling-media-bias/
can that be right?
a 1/2 degree C drop in global temps the last 2 years?

FACTS have a Liberal Bias

Have you seen that Clip with Ted Cruz getting hes Alternative facts being handed to him and then leaving ? Because thats exactly what happening here
Thats why you dont choose your START date as the hottest temperature spike on record and then extrapolate the data so that the Deploreables whom dont bother to fact check, and relay on Republican "maths". But you already knew that right ?

EDIT: Link directly debunks your article
You know the drill, assume the position Bezerker

And global temperatures are still way above the 20th century average, with March 2018 the sixth warmest ever. And February the same.
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4840141.htm

 

[Bootstoots]

Interesting article I ran into
https://www.theatlantic.com/science...hs-only-civilization/557180/?utm_source=atlfb

A bit to think about when people say the change is easily manageable and other nonsense:

Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.

I saw that article too, a while back. It's a really cool article because it goes over a lot of stuff I think about all the time. Namely, what the Squid People will think 100 million years from now, as they go through the rock strata and find the traces of our current time. Quite a lot of stuff will still be obvious in the fossil record.

One of the biggest things we've done is to scramble up all the wildlife worldwide through introductions of invasive species. Suddenly life that used to be only found in one part of the world would be found worldwide, as other things go extinct, and many of the invasive species will set up shop permanently. Their descendants will make up a sizable chunk of future wildlife around the world. Obviously bipedal apes and their descendants, whatever those are, would be all over the place too, especially since the apes often embalm and bury their dead.

Physical traces of our stuff would remain as well. Glass and rock-based building materials like concrete could survive in chunks indefinitely, and the oxides that structural metals corrode into will be distributed really strangely. Most plastic will decompose, but Teflon and other perfluorinated things will last indefinitely until they get heated to about 200 C.

Isotopes of lots of elements will be insane. There are some long-lived radioactive nuclides like iodine-129, cesium-135, uranium-236, plutonium-244, and curium-247 which have half-lives in the tens of millions of years, which means that none of them have survived the 4.5 billion years since Earth's formation but all will survive in detectable concentrations for several hundreds of millions of years. Stable isotopes will show bizarre deviations. Over half of the bioavailable nitrogen in the environment today comes from fertilizer produced through the Haber process, which is heavily depleted in nitrogen-15. We literally doubled the amount of nitrogen in the biosphere since about 1950. So there would be a huge N-15 dip. Fossil fuels are depleted in carbon-13, causing a large C-13 reduction as well (this also occurred in the PETM and in the Permian-Triassic extinction, two other large fossil carbon release events). And then oxygen-18 would dip abruptly as well, which is a sign that temperatures increased.

So yeah, that's how we know that nothing like us has ever happened before.

We will definitely face large adaptation problems caused by our carbon addiction. I am deeply pessimistic that we will somehow rein in our fossil fuel use before we get to about 3 C of warming, because it would require us to voluntarily leave fossil fuels in the ground. The logic of capitalism dictates that this will not happen until renewable energy beats fossil fuels on price in general, and all of the infrastructure is in place - until then, there will be demand for fossil fuels. Despite tremendous progress, we're still pretty far from having that happen. It's physically possible to run a society entirely on renewable energy, but we're like 50 years from that point.

What's interesting to me is that the PETM was habitable. Civilization would look very different, but it could exist at the height of the warming. So, you have a valid point when you say that change is manageable, it just isn't the one you tried to make.

J

The thing about global warming is not that it could literally make the world uninhabitable for human life. It's that it will cause lots of disruption to our present civilization, given that it is adapted to the specific climate of the 20th century. As in, sea level rise causes serious damage to coastal communities worldwide, precipitation patterns shift in large but difficult-to-forecast ways causing crop failures, heat waves and wildfire-promoting conditions become more common, etc.

https://www.investors.com/politics/...ange-global-warming-earth-cooling-media-bias/

can that be right?

a 1/2 degree C drop in global temps the last 2 years?

Yes it can be right, and in fact I predicted earlier in the thread that this claim would be made by climate change pseudoskeptics. Well, actually I predicted it for CavLancer specifically, but I think this is still good enough to serve as a confirmation of my psychic powers.

Spring 2017 is in fact probably going to be colder than spring 2016 by 0.25-0.45 C, because there isn't a monster El Niño going on right now. What I predict he'll do is use this to convince himself that it really is getting rapidly colder, which we'll see for ourselves if we wait yet another couple of years for the continuation of that "trend".

Climate projections are hard, but CavLancer projections are pretty easy.

El Niño distributes heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, causing a spike in global temperatures. February 2016 was the second-warmest month (by temperature anomaly) in the extreme 2015-16 El Niño, at +1.21 C above the 20th century average. February 2018 was a normal month, with no El Niño going on. So of course it was cooler, at +0.68 C.

In fact that was the coolest month in a long time, thanks to a little insignificant fluctuation downward. Here's the list of anomalies from September 2017 to March 2018:

09/17 - 0.78
10/17 - 0.73
11/17 - 0.76
12/17 - 0.81
01/18 - 0.70
02/18 - 0.68
03/18 - 0.83

All this guy did was look for the largest difference between peak months of the last El Niño and the corresponding months two years later. The biggest one happened to be February, at 1.21 - 0.68 = 0.53 C. Possibly he even compared datasets (different methodologies give results that differ by a few hundredths of a degree) to find the one with the largest difference, then used that to get 0.56.

I've never seen a clearer example of cherrypicking in the wild before. Props to him.

 

[Berzerker]

so if its cherrypicking to start with a peak followed by a decline, is it cherrypicking to start with a low point followed by a rise?

cuz thats what we do when we start with the little ice age followed by a rise

not that I doubt man isn't contributing to the warming trend, I dont see how adding co2 to the atmosphere doesn't make us warmer. I just dont know how much of an effect we're having because using the little ice age as a starting point skews the data.

March 2018 the sixth warmest ever. And February the same.

ever in the 20th century...or ever?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

@Bootstoots

The squid people will have nothing left to prove we existed in 100 m years. I believe that is shorter than the crust cycle for the Earth. There may be a few disparate chunks of land that are relatively untouched in that time but not many. I was recently reading an article where a bunch of scientists had published a paper showing that if intelligent civilizations had existed deep in the Earth's past, we would have almost no record of them, largely due to this fact.

 

[FriendlyFire]

so if its cherrypicking to start with a peak followed by a decline, is it cherrypicking to start with a low point followed by a rise?
cuz thats what we do when we start with the little ice age followed by a rise
not that I doubt man isn't contributing to the warming trend, I dont see how adding co2 to the atmosphere doesn't make us warmer. I just dont know how much of an effect we're having because using the little ice age as a starting point skews the data.
ever in the 20th century...or ever?

I dunno but that very Steep rise at the end which just started when we Industrialized looks weird
Seriously Berzerker the idea that earth is "cooling" and using a 2 year data point starting at record peak Temp is classical Republican tactics. We both should be very familiar with already, we can discuss climate change without the "crazies"

 

[Broken_Erika]

Any republican will say that this graph proves that climate change is a hoax. Or that it's the worst(or best) drawing of a unicorn they've ever seen. They just project whatever their minds want(or whatever Fox has implanted into their brain) onto it without actually seeing whats on it.
BTW: Worst. Unicorn. Ever.

 

[Bootstoots]

@Bootstoots

The squid people will have nothing left to prove we existed in 100 m years. I believe that is shorter than the crust cycle for the Earth. There may be a few disparate chunks of land that are relatively untouched in that time but not many. I was recently reading an article where a bunch of scientists had published a paper showing that if intelligent civilizations had existed deep in the Earth's past, we would have almost no record of them, largely due to this fact.

How would that be? We have a pretty extensive fossil record from 100 million years ago, and the isotope record is strong enough that we know there was a huge negative excursion in C-13 during the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago. Most individual things wouldn't be preserved, of course, but there should be enough left to see that something really weird happened, especially the isotope ratios and fossils from the random re-distribution of life around the world.

 

[Berzerker]

 

[FriendlyFire]

Is it just me or are we expecting a +8C increase within 100 years ?
Cause thats pretty much going to be game over for Civilization

 

[Bootstoots]

so if its cherrypicking to start with a peak followed by a decline, is it cherrypicking to start with a low point followed by a rise?

cuz thats what we do when we start with the little ice age followed by a rise

not that I doubt man isn't contributing to the warming trend, I dont see how adding co2 to the atmosphere doesn't make us warmer. I just dont know how much of an effect we're having because using the little ice age as a starting point skews the data.

Well, we could start at the medieval warm period if you want. That would only knock ~0.3 C off the warming total. And it wouldn't do anything to the trend line, which shows a remarkably steady and rather fast increase in global temperatures.

I actually agree that the baseline should be the 20th century average, because the Little Ice Age was probably a little bit cooler than ideal for our society, and the world we're adapted to is largely the 20th century world. And most importantly, everyone should use the same time period to report temperature anomalies for public use, and this should ideally be the 20th century average (or 1951-80, which is approximately equal to 1901-2000).

ever in the 20th century...or ever?

Ever recorded, obviously.

I like that graph. The most important feature to note is that really stable plateau starting around 11000 years ago and continuing to the end of the 20th century. That's the Holocene. All of human civilization, from the Neolithic to the present, happened in that unusually stable period. Humans before that never left hunting and gathering, even during the previous interglacial - the Eemian, which briefly spiked higher than the Holocene, but was much less stable. But after the last glacial period, the climate stabilized for an unusually long period of time. After the climate stabilized, agriculture developed independently in six or seven different places, and all of settled human history took place.

Now we're rocketing off the stable temperature plateau that sustained us. The climate system is not particularly stable, and we're giving it a very large shove. Beyond a few of the basics, nobody really knows what will happen or how well we'll adapt. We've never been here before. But we do know that the climate will change dramatically everywhere, and that human societies and their crops are settled in patterns that assume that the climate will be basically the same year after year, and that nothing happens to the coastline. This is no longer true, and it will not be true for thousands of years into the future.

The Holocene is dead, and we have killed it. Long live the Anthropocene!

Still, let's try to make the transition as smooth as possible. That means limiting the amount of carbon we release.

Edit: Added the following:

Is it just me or are we expecting a +8C increase within 100 years ?
Cause thats pretty much going to be game over for Civilization

No, it's in Fahrenheit on the right scale, so they're predicting like 4.5 C. That's actually quite a bit higher than I would expect, based on what we've seen so far. My best guess - and it's just a hunch - is that we'll probably get something like 2.5 C by 2100 with a plateau around 3-3.5 C in the mid-22nd century, assuming mid-range emissions. But the error bars are large, and 4.5 C in 2100 is not totally out of the realm of possibility.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

How would that be? We have a pretty extensive fossil record from 100 million years ago, and the isotope record is strong enough that we know there was a huge negative excursion in C-13 during the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago. Most individual things wouldn't be preserved, of course, but there should be enough left to see that something really weird happened, especially the isotope ratios and fossils from the random re-distribution of life around the world.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/

When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.

Individual fossils may survive but the landscape (and landscape sized objects) do not. Even a lot of the atmospheric processes that we've altered wouldn't necessarily be detectable as clearly artificial spikes after millions of years.

They don't conclude it would be impossible, just a lot harder than people generally assume.

My own hypothesizing:
It seems that fossils actually survive better than man made objects because they chemically change to stone. Most human products break down in ordinary organic molecules or rust - both of which would be dispersed enough to hide their origin by those same processes that broke them down. Today's medium grade copper deposit may have once been a Dino-Google server farm back in the day.

Individual artifacts that somehow survive might also not be recognized for what they are. A fossil still looks like a skeleton and we know what a skeleton looks like. But who knows what products an alien mind crafted would look like? And how would you tell it apart from ordinary garbage? Better yet, how would the village idiots who inevitably find it know what it is and not simply destroy/recycle/discard it instead? After all most people aren't smart or educated and there are way more idiots than anthropologists so odds are they would be the ones to find something and just take it to be normal human detritus.

Finally, you and I can't guarantee that weird isotopic ratios and so on are going to persist as by-products of human civilization for ever. We might learn to clean up our act. We might go extinct. We might pack up and leave Earth. But if any of those things happen in like the next 10,000 years, what we've done to the place will likely straighten itself out in 100 million years such that it may not even be detectable or may show up as a tiny anomalous spike in the geological record just as easily attributed to natural processes as alien intelligence.

Plus, at this time scale you can't always directly measure the types of things you're talking about - you can only infer it from features in the rocks, further obscuring the full story of what happened. It's not like there are ice cores from 100 million years ago you can run through an analyzing machine.


The space probes we sent into deep space will likely survive billions of years largely recognizable. Our probes within the solar system might have a few thousand to millions of years depending on the stability of their final orbits and how lucky they are. I imagine our artifacts on the moon will survive millions of years easily since the moon is largely dead. They will be continually pounded by radiation and meteorites but I think the larger artifacts will remain recognizable for at least that long.

 

[Bootstoots]

Individual fossils may survive but the landscape (and landscape sized objects) do not. Even a lot of the atmospheric processes that we've altered wouldn't necessarily be detectable as clearly artificial spikes after millions of years.

They don't conclude it would be impossible, just a lot harder than people generally assume.

My own hypothesizing:
It seems that fossils actually survive better than man made objects because they chemically change to stone. Most human products break down in ordinary organic molecules or rust - both of which would be dispersed enough to hide their origin by those same processes. Today's medium grade copper deposit may have once been a Dino-Google server farm back in the day.

Individual artifacts that somehow survive might also not be recognized for what they are. A fossil still looks like a skeleton and we know what a skeleton looks like. But who knows what products an alien mind crafted would look like? And how would you tell it apart from ordinary garbage? Better yet, how would the village idiots who inevitably find it know what it is and not simply destroy/recycle/discard it instead? After all most people aren't smart or educated and there are way more idiots than anthropologists so odds are they would be the ones to find something and just take it to be normal human detritus.

We do at least know from isotope data that nothing disrupted the nitrogen cycle in the way we did, or burned large amounts of fossil fuels, or operated nuclear reactors. The coal beds from the Carboniferous were apparently left undisturbed, or the dino-people didn't find many of them. Much of the reason we have so much coal is that fungi that degrade lignin appear not to have evolved, or were not very efficient, for c. 50 million years after the appearance of wood, so a whole lot of woody material wasn't decomposed effectively over a 50-million-year timespan. We got a one-time-only bonus from that. I don't think anyone's found evidence for a mysterious global population exchange of life forms either, which should show up in the fossil record, as should an explosion of skeletons from the intelligent animal all found in the same stratum.

What we can't prove is that nothing evolved that developed the level of technology we had before the Industrial Revolution, but never beyond that. If we hadn't had an industrial revolution, there would be much less evidence of organized, settled life. We're definitely the first industrial civilization, but could plausibly not have been the first civilization as we define that word.

 

[Berzerker]

Is it just me or are we expecting a +8C increase within 100 years ? Cause thats pretty much going to be game over for Civilization

Believe it or not, the Younger Dryas ended with an even larger increase...at least for Greenland. Course the higher latitudes warm and cool more than the lower latitudes during big climate swings, but we still dont know exactly why it happened. Researchers believe it (the YD) started because of cold fresh melt water entering the N Atlantic shutting down the conveyor belt transferring warm water northward. But the difference between then and now is we were coming out of the ice age whereas we're already warm. An 8C increase would disappear much of Florida and coastlines all over the world. Yikes.

 

[Hrothbern]

I think isotopes will tell a lot.

Also:
If our civilisation continues diminishing the habitats of wild mammals, and not put wild animal reservates back in place, we will likely see a mass extinction of most bigger mammal species before 2100 already. The process continueing for increasing smaller mammal species, except the ones that fit somehow in our civilised habitat.
If we are gone or down, no doubt the surviving mammals will mutate again to new species to fill up all the habitats.
Such a change of fossil species should be detectable in a 100 million years from now.

EDIT
Climate change will boost that diminishing of habitats when huge amount of people will migrate to higher ground and more fertile areas.
I do not think that under the pressure of starvation remaining habitats have a good chance to prevail.

 

[Angst]

Your pic showcases how warming has never happened as fast and sudden as now without stuff like serial volcanic eruptions or a giant meteor crash. You might believe that the Pleistocene spikes shows it's happened before, but the time scale there covers vastly longer periods of time than the Holocene/Anthropocene.

 

[Berzerker]

Your pic showcases how warming has never happened as fast and sudden as now without stuff like serial volcanic eruptions or a giant meteor crash. You might believe that the Pleistocene spikes shows it's happened before, but the time scale there covers vastly longer periods of time than the Holocene/Anthropocene.

The warming ending the Younger Dryas was bigger and faster, researchers believe it might have happened within a decade or 3, but thats not really comparable to today. Its one thing for the world to warm up coming out of an ice age (or following the YD reversal) and another to warm up in a relatively warmer world. But thats the same problem with using the little ice age as a starting point for the current warming.

One theory is the YD was caused by shutting down the Atlantic conveyor system with meltwater but another says an impact delayed the warming trend coming out of the ice age so once the cause of the YD was gone the world quickly made up the lost ground. On the graph there's a 'small' dip at about 12-13kya followed by an increase in temps. It was thought humans entering the new world caused the extinction of larger mammals but the YD was so bad even we were on the brink of disappearing.

 

[Bootstoots]

The warming ending the Younger Dryas was bigger and faster, researchers believe it might have happened within a decade or 3, but thats not really comparable to today. Its one thing for the world to warm up coming out of an ice age (or following the YD reversal) and another to warm up in a relatively warmer world. But thats the same problem with using the little ice age as a starting point for the current warming.

One theory is the YD was caused by shutting down the Atlantic conveyor system with meltwater but another says an impact delayed the warming trend coming out of the ice age so once the cause of the YD was gone the world quickly made up the lost ground. On the graph there's a 'small' dip at about 12-13kya followed by an increase in temps. It was thought humans entering the new world caused the extinction of larger mammals but the YD was so bad even we were on the brink of disappearing.

That's true - the end of the Younger Dryas was indeed very fast, especially over Europe, Greenland, and northeast North America. Its effects were considerably smaller in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere - the graph you have shows data from Greenland in light blue and Antarctica in dark blue. In the paleoclimate record, carbon has never been emitted as quickly as it is today, but fast temperature changes have occurred before.

The YD event showcases something that may be the opposite of what you're looking for - namely, that the climate is nowhere near as stable as it has happened to be for the last 11000 years. Comparatively small changes, like a meltwater pulse into the North Atlantic, can produce effects that are far larger, like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream and a return of Ice Age conditions to Europe and North America.

We know there are positive feedbacks on the warmer end of the temperature scale as well, such as methane escaping from permafrost melting and the ice-albedo effect over the Arctic Ocean. We could easily hit a tipping point where positive feedback dominates for a time and temperatures climb much faster than they are today. We don't know how much warming it would take to do that; all we know is that things get much more dangerous as the amount of warming increases.