UKC

The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are not decreasing, not stabilising not just increasing but increasing at an accelerating rate.

https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/greenhouse-gas-concentrations...

I think we are headed for a truly terrible clusterf*ck of overpopulation, destruction of soils and seas leading to reduction in food productivity, all compounded by the effects of warming.

And it really is too late do anything about it.

Any counterarguments to my pessimism?

In reply to pasbury:


Nope though I cling to the hope it may not be too late to do anything about it. The situation is unprecedented, the solution may be too though I suspect in all probability we'll fall back on the old one of futile bloodletting.

It's taken us just 250 years to make this mess, we might have 100 years, 3 generations at most to clean it up before the pressures imposed by changing climate and failing life support make a high population, high tech solution impractical to implement. We'll waste another one of those arguing over the nature of the problem... The future looks bleak but it is unwritten.
jk

In reply to pasbury:

Recent research on carbon budgets suggest we may have a bit more time than we previously thought - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41319885

Also, I haven't read the full details of the CO2 rise, but I thought that El Nino was largely responsible for this year's increase.

It's still a challenge but maybe we shouldn't give up just yet.

In reply to pasbury:


I say we bring back the days, the good old days, where oxygen levels in the atmosphere were up to 40% and wet wood would burn. When humans hadn't been invented and dragonflies with metre long wingspans buzzed around in the air whilst sea scorpions and Jaekelopterus mooched about the oceans. Or we could go back to when it was positively tropical and the average global temperature was 23 degrees, with palm trees and crocodiles in the Arctic.

jkarran thinks the future is bleak... but if it looks anything like the above then I say it sounds wicked.

Nb. tongue firmly in cheek.

In reply to pasbury:

Sixty odd million years down the line and we are still debating how the dinosaurs died out. Well perhaps it won't be so long as we previously thought before some other species is pondering as to how humans became extinct.

In reply to mypyrex:
I think its generally accepted that the dinosaurs whent extinct due to massive and sudden climate change. And who says you can learn nothing from history.

In reply to ebdon:


Quite. Without that climate change we’d probably not have seen the explosion of more advanced life including humans. Evolution is driven by such events.

The question is, are we as a species going to put ourselves with the dinosaurs through climactic mass extinction or through technological obsolescence (AI and/or genetic engineering)?

In reply to pasbury:

Maybe Mrs Num Num will survive the extinction and evolve into some weird species.

In reply to wintertree:

Yeah but i think you need to draw a clear line between climate change on a geological time scale and rate of climate change the dinosaurs saw and we are biggining to see. A point that seems to be missed by many who dont belive in climate change.

In reply to wintertree:


In an evolutionary sense it remains to be seen whether we are 'advanced' or not. We've a few million years to go before we outlast the dinosaurs.

In reply to ebdon:

A good point although I’m not sure how much of the past mass extinctions were “geological” and how many were more “nuclear winter” from early epoch asteroid bombardments. Certainly it’s a different kind of mass extinction we are leading in to, and it’s a different kind of world. Hard to predict what the future will look like. Different, and in many ways not in a good way.

In reply to GrahamD:


I disagree. We are leaving the planet and are on the cusp of being able to continue independently of the planet. The dinosaurs weren’t. We appear to be the first species to arise that is defined more by its intellect and collective achievements than by its animal biology.

Odds aren’t looking great for getting life sustainably offworld before some sort of awful interregnum to Spaceflight. Advanced animals with advanced problems...

In reply to pasbury:

No, I think your pessimism is warranted.
Another tragedy though is that global co-operation has not been achieved, and we have the countries with the last remnants of rainforest clear-cutting it for animal agriculture. If you take a planet-wide viewpoint, we need to keep that shit and not cut any single bit of it down. We should work together so those nations are not disadvantaged because they can't mine or farm the rainforest.

But I think there is a reason to have hope, and to work towards a brighter future. There will still be a lot to save. Ultimately you have to think that there will be future generations, and they will appreciate any effort you made to try and preserve a some semblance of the richness of Earth for them. The same way we appreciate the National parks we have, and the sacrifices made by those in the past.

One question I have is whether humans as is (i.e. genetically speaking), are capable of forming a sustainable civilization? Or are we too driven by the base instinct of greed?

On the schadenfreude side - the US itself will become very inhabitable in 100 years - already large parts of it are changing. The wine areas are burning, the South is flooding. So they will be forced to sleep in the bed they've made.

In reply to pasbury:

The rise in CO2 recently is a direct result in the rise and use of CO2 tyre inflators so we can blame cyclists.
In fact i've not long got one myself so blame me if it makes anyone feel better.

In reply to wintertree:


Uh? I thought you were talking about humans?

In reply to jkarran:


We seem to have wasted one of them just arguing over whether there's even a problem that needs addressing, and the most powerful leader in the world still doesn't seem convinced. I think your timescales need extending massively. If only we had time for that.

In reply to john arran:

Travelling around the world climbing and living between two different locations (according to your profile)...just wondering how you manage to blank that all out when your contributing to threads on c02?

Not having a go, we are all selfish...obviously some more than others. Just wondering how you square the circle in your own head?

In reply to SenzuBean:

On this question I am an optimist, humans (we) are unique in being altruistic. But this feature of our nature only seems to operate at certain scales e.g. the parochial.

In reply to pasbury:

I believe that Mr Trump is right.

It's all fake news.

Darwen was also wrong. Only the rich survive, not the strongest.

In reply to wintertree:



It’s inspiring in some ways that you can argue that we are about to colonise Mars thanks to Elon Musk and Space X, but I think colonisation is still way off being reality. We are at the level of dugout canoe rather than Mayflower.

In reply to The Lemming:




Have you been on the Old Peculier?

In reply to pasbury:

youtube.com/watch?v=sxqvwkmTNy8&

In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:


I suspect my profile doesn't show an accurate picture in some respects. The vast majority of my travel nowadays is for work delivering international aid programmes, mainly in post conflict and developing countries. Travel for climbing is overwhelmingly often just a five or ten minute drive from home, or walking the ten minutes to the crags I've equipped on the hillside behind Chez Arran.

And I'm not sure what that has to do with contributing to threads. It's clear the big gains in CO2 emissions reduction will only happen through legislation, national to some extent but ultimately international. It's this international agreement that I was referring to in my earlier post, and it would be a valid observation whether it came from a hermit in a cave or from a trans-Atlantic commuter.

In reply to pasbury:


I agree with your sentiment - but also stand by my previous post. We are only a century or two away, whereas a century ago it was unthinkable. In terms of recorded human history (itself far shorter in duration than humanities existence) we are basically there.

The point of my post was that this is basically possible and hasn’t been for any other species before us, clearly marking humanity as “advanced” in species terms.


I disagree with this analogy. The dugout was a leading technology of its time with people having no idea what a sailing ship would be like or how to build one. Where as we have many more real and rested advanced spacecraft technologies than have been used on Mars missions (Fission thermal drives, solar electric ion drives, inflatable habitats etc) and we have robust designs for far more advanced craft than have been launched.

Conceptually we are way beyond the dugout and way beyond sailing ships. There are technology hurdles to colonising mars, but all are tractable. The main hurdle is the financing, and even with the cost reductions coming from the scale and reusability being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX, it’s going to be very expensive until the global economy increases GDP by an order of magnitude through general technological progress.

In reply to pasbury:

You may well be right. I think for a lot of people, including legislators, realisation will come to late. Sadly, I think we humans are a largely selfish bunch, who have systematically set about the increasingly industrial rape of the only place we can live. Maybe the dire consequences you hint at will in the long term reduce our impact on our home world.

I think overpopulation and climate change are it two most pressing problems, and we appear unable to do little of substance about either!

In reply to pasbury:

Rather than going to Mars and turning it into Earth we could just choose to stay here and keep it habitable.
One problem is the chronic ignorance of our species. Consider that 40% of the US population believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted and that the planet is 6000 years old. And that the people they have voted into power believe the same.

In reply to pasbury:


La la la la, I can't hear you?

In reply to pasbury:

The interesting/v.scary thing abiut this is the rise in methane levels, where they're unable yo track to source, suggesting that undiscovered negative feedback loops have already began

In reply to womblingfree:

Do you have a reference for that - there are plenty of known feedback loops like the release from thawing tundra.

In reply to john arran:


I agree but I suspect that's all we've got before we sufficiently destabilise the world we know that the stable cooperative political environment needed to develop technological solutions no longer exists. Most likely we fail and human population collapses along with living standards for those who survive as the foundations on which population has grown: public hygene, evidence based medicine, industrial agriculture and readily available transportable energy crumble, cooperative connections are frayed and broken by resource wars, the mass movement of climate/war refugees and the bunker mentality that will instill in those clinging to habitable enclaves. Cheery stuff.
jk

In reply to wintertree:


As I say, it still remains to be seen whether our intellect will work faster than our inherent ability to f*ck up our environment.

In reply to The Lemming:


The rich are the strongest.

In reply to pasbury:

I'm going to watch my Utopia DVD's again.

In reply to GrahamD:


I agree strongly with you on this. I just disagree with your view that we may not be advanced because of the problems we cause ourselves and other life on the planet. As a species we are advanced but not mature and that is the problem. Society is in our evolutionary heritage like none before us but here lies an evolutionary trap - Planetarily Safe Society can’t enter the genome of a species that doesn’t survive Society...

In reply to jkarran:

I doubt whether we have as much as 100 years to sort it out.

In reply to wintertree:

I think we are probably talking at cross purposes here. We are clearly advanced in terms of intelligence. What is not yet clear is that intelligence (in the form we posses it) is a good long term evolutionary trait.

In reply to Phil1919:


We probably agree. I think if we're well through cleaning up our industrial revolution air and agrichemical pollution by then I suspect civilisation as we know it can continue with populations stabilising then eventually gradually declining supported by technology. If we're just getting started after another hundred years of debate and inaction then we're done for. As I said, I think our future looks very bleak indeed since the latter seems more probable.
jk

In reply to jkarran:

I'd expect far seeing politicians to look to their nations enhancing trading regionally and locally where possible to reduce unnecessary production-miles contributing to CO2 emissions

In reply to The Lemming:




Darwin never said that.

The species most able to adapt is the one that survives. But you’re right, the richest countries will be the ones to survive.

We are already closing out borders to people who want to escape from droughts, flooding and war bought on by climate change.

With 4bn people on the planet it’s very difficult to see how the species can become extinct. We have some pretty clever people and technology at our disposal. Even if we lost 99.9% of the worlds population there would still be 40million of us.

In reply to DancingOnRock:


This was brought home to me recently look at an infographic about diminished wildlife populations. I can't remember if it was focussed on Leopards, Tigers, Lions etc or Chimps, Orangs, Gorillas, but next to each it showed the current global population.

It was staggering just how small they were. Iconic animals that nearly every person on the planet would probably recognise, existed in just there tens of thousands or less...while we march upwards in the billions.

Was depressing to read. Seemed so dramatically out of balance; our own numbers, our consumption, our inability to do anything without completely re-shaping the surface of the planet, and our needs always put ahead of the multitude of species we should be sharing the planet with.

My feeling is global warming is the least of our problems. If it is as the scientists say, I expect it will eventually become such a pressing issue that grand technological and social fixes akin to the Manhatten Project (and possibly helped by a confluence of electric cars, fission and growing environmental awareness) will be discovered no matter how expensive. Large areas of land will be permanently changed and substantial loss of life might ensue, but I suspect it will register as barely a blip in the upward growth of human populations.

What we probably won't survive is the competition for resources, which right now can be coped with because most of the global population can expect only a very small share of those resources. That is changing, and as the number wanting our level of consumption doubles or triples from the present figure our planet will be fvcked. It will live on of course. As will we. But that huge diversity of fauna and flora which we should hold dear will exist as a tiny percentage of its current range.

If we survive to that point, having single handedly screwed the planet for all other living creatures, I'd be only too happy to see humanity wiped out. We'd deserve nothing less.

In reply to David Martin:


That's it in a nutshell for me, there's already too humans on this planet, it's rapidly becoming a more and more unpleasant place to be (unless one is wealthy).

I'm quite glad I'm rushing towards my twilight years and death, and won't have to witness the degeneration of planet Earth.
(and I'm usually the eternal optimist!)
Pity my poor children though, they've got another 70 or 80 years to go.

In reply to GrahamD:

how many forms of intelligence are there?
In my view it's applying the scientific method, pure and simple; the problem is to what do we apply it, that's where ethics come in. Huge effort has been made to measure, with incredible accuracy, purturbations and occlusions of distant stars so we might deduce that planets orbit around them. Yet measurements of human happiness and well-being on our own planet are reduced to a single number in the eyes of our rulers; GDP.

In reply to pasbury:

here we go, there's a paragraph and quote towards the end of the article

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41778089

In reply to Lusk:





Well here’s the kicker; it’s been becoming a much more pleasant place to live for the vast majority, yes including all the new billions. For now. By treating the earth as a resource we will do very well until we degrade those resources.

In reply to pasbury:

In fact, higher CO2 concentration is not only harmful but it has benefits also. Thank´ s to its fertilisation it allows higher food productivity with less water needed. More CO2 added a green continet of size of USA to the world vegetation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004

In reply to pavelk:

It’s an ‘adjustment’ but can we cope with it?

In reply to jkarran:

I'd say more like 15 years.

In reply to Phil1919:


Before man made climate change destabilises the global political order making any form of coordinated response impossible or before it enters a realistically unstoppable spiral of positive feedback? Nuclear winter never looked so good
jk

In reply to pasbury:

If we don´ t waste money and resources on useless measures with no real impact on global temerature, I am pretty sure we can

In reply to pasbury:

Counterarguments?

Have a look at Piers Corbyn's stuff at
www.weatheraction.com




(Yes. They ARE related.)

In reply to Jim Fraser:


Indeed. I often suspected they learnt meteorology and economics from the same place...

In reply to pavelk:


A question for you. What if I am fundamentally wrong about anthropogenic climate change?

The way I see it we spend a few decades making the air we breathe cleaner and weening ourselves off our finite fossil energy reserves. There's still serious economic activity in that, nothing radically changes in how societies need to organise. The petrochemical companies will have the time and capital required to diversify and reinvent as many already are begining to having themselves seen the writing on the wall. It's not like we're in a desperate race to the bottom to out compete a neighbouring world. What if we accidentally clean up the only world we have to live on 'for no good reason'?

Now what if you are wrong?
jk

In reply to oldie:



Wrong I think on both counts. Darwin (spelling please - he's not a town in Lancashire!) referred to "fittest" not "strongest", though I guess you could use either word in this context. Darwin referred to "survival of the fittest", but I think a Darwinian would define the "fittest" as those who survive - it's a tautology.

Neither the rich, nor the physically strong are necessarily the "fittest". The fittest are simply those who produce more children and rear them to child-bearing age.

Martin

In reply to jkarran:

The current climate policies are wasting our limited resources of money and technology because they are expensive without any significant impact on climate. They also bring many negative side effects like deforestatin, soil degradation, dieselgate and cash flow from the poor to the rich. Good summary is here
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/climate-change-the-facts/

The climate change policies are not about clean enviroment. Combustion of natural gas is cleaner than combustion of biomass in all conceivable aspects

In reply to pasbury: No counterarguments. Pessimism is justified from an anthropocentric viewpoint.

The world will survive, adapt, develop. We are killing species and habitats at an *almost* unprecedented rate - but this will drive the next great surge in natural selection. Only those species who can adapt quick enough to the "new normal" will thrive.

The Human race....f*cked.

In reply to pasbury:

Why stop at CO2. How about adding nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides to the list of harmful gases. All generated by the
cars we love to drive. I am as guilty as the rest as I have a car too. Lets not forget our ever friendly H2O - also a greenhouse gas. Please someone correct me if the latter is wrong.

When I was a kid most households only had one car or even a few still didn't have a car. How practical is that now. We are a victim of our own success. I'm not saying cars are the worst as planes are meant to be far worse is my understanding so does that mean we shouldn't go on trips overseas. The list and argument can go on - is the world overpopulated - there are many questions need to be addressed and answered in a meaningful way.

Yes, something needs doing but how serious are we when world leaders and their entourage jet round the world on the next climate summit.

In reply to jkarran:

I think you are considering this from a Western European, Old World perspective. Fuel/ energy poverty is a real problem in the third world.

Premature death from cooking with solid fuel (I.e. dung & timber) is a real problem in the third world; fossil fuels offer real benefits.

Saying that the Third World should bypass fossil fuel use, and go straight to renewables, is like insisting they only eat salad, to combat the global rise in obesity.

In reply to The Lemming:

>


If you reckon Darwen's not right, I'd stay well away from Bacup.

In reply to blurty:

Oddly enough for random reasons I'm well aware of the prevalence and problems associated with solid fuel cooking. Couldn't tell you much else about life in rural Africa mind.

I'm viewing the problem from a world perspective, not old world or new world or third world. Those people cooking over wood and dung will be the first to die when crops start failing or the rains don't come. It's not one problem or the other deserving of attention and the solution to both is no to continue rolling our extraction and refining industry out across the globe while green washing our homes and cars, it has to be far bolder than that. The 'let or encourage them have their chance to fuc* it all up like we did' leaves billions without life support in the long run so to my mind it does not constitute a viable option.
Jk