This is a problem that literally had minimal societal consequences just a few years ago before the 2018 supreme court ruling[1]. I don't see why we shouldn't just try to move the laws back to how things were in 2017.
This claim that if they stopped training new models wouldn’t the old ones become stale as things are updated? Not sure how quickly that would occur but it does seem likely as the world moves fast
The Amazon rainforest is not an ecosystem that burns. It’s not adapted to it and it effectively destroys it permanently on a human time scale. It requires wet conditions that are fostered by trees and heavy organic forest litter like leaves. Even if a fire in the Amazon only burns the ground litter it will kill the that part of the forest because the trees have adapted to those leaves being there.
The Amazon rainforest is close to a tipping point at which point it will almost entirely die off and convert to Savanah. And if you think fossil fuels are incredibly useful wait till you learn how useful a stable climate has been
The Amazon rain forest creates its own local wet climate, and when that cycle is broken the place will be far drier than many would expect.
Mismanagement is ultimately a self-correcting problem, as local extinction events are also natural. If I recall the rain-forest floor organic layer is rather thin when compared to other ecosystems.
However, China economic interests in South America agriculture and resources is a complex issue. All world donations sent to help preserve the forest was negligible by comparison. =3
The misconception here is that the carbon in the Bakken is locked up geologically and essentially removed the biosphere’s carbon cycle but the Amazon is not. Even if the entire Amazon rainforest were to burn it wouldn’t change that. The problem with fossil fuels is that we are added sequestered to our biosphere at rates it cannot adapt to.
So while absolute terms are less it isn’t the same and we should be worried about what OP is discussing
It’s not that more CO2 is bad it’s that the rate of change is faster than any time in the geologic history of earth. And every mass extinction including the dinosaurs involved abrupt changes to CO2 levels. Every living thing is made out of carbon that came from CO2. Every scientist studying climate change knows this. But every organism on this planet evolved for ice age like conditions and in the span of 200 years we turned the earth’s thermostat from Ice Age to Hot House
Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about climate change and CO2 levels is that it’s not the level so much as the rate. We’re on the path to doubling (or have doubled if you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn’t have ice caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.
Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.
So it’s pretty clear we need to adopt solar radiation management r&d asap. Because that is the only feasible way we will stabilize the heat balance in the next few decades.
The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.
But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!
I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine doing anything effective about this.
The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.
To my understanding, the only time CO2 emissions were down was during covid.
While there are a few localized success stories, I'm not aware we've actually meaningfully impacted our trajectory.
To be abundantly clear: it's true that eg. Trump's administration will have limited effect, mainly because it's a global thing ... But global emissions have been rising, too.
People have predicted peak CO2 multiple times, but it hasn't actually crystalized beyond the shutdown year to my knowledge.
I think we witnessed a profound paradigm shift last week - China is the new global driving force to avert climate catastrophy. The probably peaked CO2 output last year. Last yeear they reached their 2030 target for renewables as share of total energy production. Almost 60% of new cars sold there are electric. And China produced more PV cells in the first half of this year alone than have been installed in the US in sum, ever.
And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.
I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.
I think reality is a potentially a bit darker in that we really have impacted the trajectory, it is just grossly insufficient to have a meaningful change in the direction.
We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.
We can say the growth curve is not exponential, its now linear. At the most hopeful, we can say its plateauing and we will hit peak carbon emissions soon (some say we've already hit it).
But all that's modeling, there are too many variables to really know.
The US has turned to authoritarianism. It seems naive to think this is going to go away in an election.
Our government is owned by the ultra wealthy who pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good. Some of these people are just cynical; others identify their narrow interests with the common good. In either case they’ll continue to steer our world toward self destruction.
The best thing to do isn’t to hide one’s head in the sand or place our faith in failed institutions. These are two kinds of denial. We should be building a base of popular power in labor unions. The ideology is solidarity and striking holds actual power over the ownership class. It’s really the only thing that has a chance of leading society out of the collapse we are witnessing around us.
No. Of course we shouldn't "place faith in our institutions" but there is a degree of "If Gorman is going to burn, let it burn all the more brightly". You can galvanize a lot of individual / collective action without the government when people see consequences enabled by authoritarian structures.
You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.
What is the temporal resolution of the ice cores or whatever else is being used to measure when the last “hot house” periods were? Because today we are measuring CO2 with minute-level resolution. But I feel like an ice core might be a year at best, probably much worse. Which if I’m right would mean we really don’t know how fast or slow we entered into the last hot period (the rate)
My understanding is very challenging for a few reasons.
1. A forest is not just a bunch of trees. It’s most healthy and robust with mature trees and right animal life that supports and propagates them
2. The short term economic incentives towards rehabilitating the forest aren’t there and are actively counter productive for soy and beef farming
3. It might already be past a tipping point as some parts of the forest are dying out and setting on fire through natural causes. The Amazon rainforest is NOT an ecosystem that is used to burning and it cannot recover from it since it destroys the ground cover and soils rainforest plants depend on to grow. Plants that like wet conditions need wet conditions to prosper, dusty charred clay ain’t that
Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I’ve seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and don’t cycle through water like the rain forest would. We’ll also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to completely different global rainfall patterns than we know today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me, but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns that helps the Amazon
It’s certainly possible, but it might be that it’s very difficult for some organisms to evolve certain protections because adapting can reduce fitness in other ways. So maybe there is a barrier that would help it from UVC but perhaps that makes the virus less likely to bind at key sites and thus not able to replicate.
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...