(no subject)
Apr. 10th, 2015 07:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljgeoffI wonder sometimes if folks who read general layman articles on climate change are soothed by what they read. I read articles like this and am horrified and enraged. I just read Thawing Permafrost Will ‘Seep, Not Explode’ CO2 from frigging Climate Central -
"How much carbon will be released, however, and how much extra warming is likely to result, has been a matter of dispute in recent years. Some researchers have argued that that the effects will be horrific, while others say they’ll be significant but less dramatic. And now, a new report in Nature — the most comprehensive study ever done on the permafrost feedback loop, has come down firmly in the “significant” camp. “The permafrost carbon is not going to explode into the atmosphere catastrophically within just a few years,” Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University, said. “It’s more like it will seep out slowly in small amounts in a very large number of places.”
So, calm down, it's not going to explode out over a small period of time and kill everybody now, it's going to seep out and kill everybody later -- after we've all had our lives.
And, heck, we've got fifty years before everybody starts dying! (We're not counting the people who are dying now 'cause poor people always die from starvation and war; that's just the way the world is.) Fifty years! We'll go green by then and all the carbon dioxide and methane will go away! No worries, move along and quit spewing all that end of the world nonsense. Go buy something, it'll make you feel better. :)
The reality of the situation is simple physics. We've gone from our base to 1C° warming in a little over a hundred years, but we'll go from 1C° to 2C° in about twenty years. And 3C° warming? What would you guess? Fifteen years later? Ten? And what will those 2C° of warming in a forty year time-span do to our ability to feed seven billion people? And what will be the social/political fallout of some 3-4 billion people dying of starvation at the same time?
Yeah, no worries.
"How much carbon will be released, however, and how much extra warming is likely to result, has been a matter of dispute in recent years. Some researchers have argued that that the effects will be horrific, while others say they’ll be significant but less dramatic. And now, a new report in Nature — the most comprehensive study ever done on the permafrost feedback loop, has come down firmly in the “significant” camp. “The permafrost carbon is not going to explode into the atmosphere catastrophically within just a few years,” Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University, said. “It’s more like it will seep out slowly in small amounts in a very large number of places.”
So, calm down, it's not going to explode out over a small period of time and kill everybody now, it's going to seep out and kill everybody later -- after we've all had our lives.
And, heck, we've got fifty years before everybody starts dying! (We're not counting the people who are dying now 'cause poor people always die from starvation and war; that's just the way the world is.) Fifty years! We'll go green by then and all the carbon dioxide and methane will go away! No worries, move along and quit spewing all that end of the world nonsense. Go buy something, it'll make you feel better. :)
The reality of the situation is simple physics. We've gone from our base to 1C° warming in a little over a hundred years, but we'll go from 1C° to 2C° in about twenty years. And 3C° warming? What would you guess? Fifteen years later? Ten? And what will those 2C° of warming in a forty year time-span do to our ability to feed seven billion people? And what will be the social/political fallout of some 3-4 billion people dying of starvation at the same time?
Yeah, no worries.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-10 01:31 pm (UTC)It is also making me think that maybe my students resist writing about environmental topics because it makes them feel powerless. For decades we've believed that if we environmentalists could make people understand and care, they would rise up to address the problems -- but we're running out of time on that plan.
Great post. Scary content.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-11 02:45 am (UTC)