Normally I wouldn't care

I hope the 4 year shambles can be cleared up; it won't be easy.

 

This run away train won't stop until we realize that the world's militaries primarily serve the fossil fuel industry and periodic global climate conferences don't reduce emissions but act as oil industry trade shows that boost their government subsidies and thus boost emissions. Regime change at a global scale is needed... The other challenge is all the dishonest TV ads about how oil companies are your friend and are doing all they can to help address climate change actually work on people.

 

It's cold comfort: but someone near and dear to me keeps me abreast of the latest alt-right propaganda. Apparently oil is boundless. Same for fresh water. Also, we're doing the plants and trees a favour dumping carbon into the air; they thrive on it.

 

Here is another example of the inability of politicians to change the path we are all heading.

Martinez-Alvarez CB, Hazlett C, Mahdavi P, Ross ML. Political leadership has limited impact on fossil fuel taxes and subsidies. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Nov 22;119(47):e2208024119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2208024119. Epub 2022 Nov 14. PMID: 36375060; PMCID: PMC9704748.

Our findings suggest that the impact of leaders on fossil fuel taxes and subsidies is surprisingly limited and often ephemeral. This holds true regardless of the leader's age, gender, education, or political ideology. Rulers who govern during an economic crisis perform no better or worse than other rulers.​

 

Note the dates: March 31, 2021. P46's Administration took care of this after only a couple months, not years.

Also:

Peak Oil folks have been warning about the future supply shortage and cost of extracting fossil fuels since before I was born. Their projections of when production will peak and start declining, keep proving premature. With $Trillions of potential profits at stake, the industry keeps finding enough brainpower and creativity to continue finding more reserves and more ways to economically extract them.

My understanding is that known fossil fuel reserves are now about 5 times larger than estimates of what the atmosphere can absorb without shoving us far past an AGW tipping point. Enough to push global temperatures up nearly 10C, rendering large swaths of the planet uninhabitable to humans. Outdoors, at least.

I'm thinking that the cost of extracting fossil fuel won't ever be as expensive as the costs of surviving and living in the conditions caused by burning it. If we can fix the later, then the former will take care of itself.

 

The saving grace of our ecological system is that there is built in negative feedback. When CO2 increases, plant life thrives and uses the CO2/photosynthesis to create/store sugar. This tends to reduce the CO2 level from the level it would attain without the feedback slowing down "Global Warming" and buying us a bit more time.

JeffD

 

Idk

 

iydkwd?

 

When I was born, Keeling's Mauna Loa CO2 measurements were 316 ppm, seasonally adjusted. Up not quite 40 points from pre-industrial times.

When I joined PriusChat, it was 386 ppm. Now, it is 418 ppm, up over 100 points during my life.

Just how well is that negative feedback working? Very weakly.


Plant growth is also temperature dependent, also varying by plant species. High temperatures tend to slow or stop that growth. I understand that a lot of them already run into high temperature slowdowns, so to maintain their CO2 storage rate as climate warms, they have to migrate poleward. The too-hot places have very sparse plant growth.

 

I don't assert that fossil fuels are truly unlimited. Rather, that humans will be limited by other factors, such as fossil fuel exhaust emissions, before we reach the fossil fuel availability limit.

The known fossil fuels appear to be enough to push the CO2 level to around 2000 ppm.

 

A bit more time than we would have without this effect. But it's a well-understood effect and already baked in to estimates of how much time we have.

The explanation about the negative feedback can be too simple though.

Having cleverly avoided taking differential equations as an undergrad, I was invited to include that class in my first semester of grad school. And one of the things made very clear in that class is how a system governed by such equations (like our climate) can have stable equilibria ... plural ... not a single equilibrium. It may have been settled into one equilibrium for millions of years. Knock it away from there in any direction, and the various feedbacks will tend to bring it back there. As long as the knock is small enough.

A bigger knock, and the system will eventually settle at equilibrium again—but it can be a totally different equilibrium than the starting one. Different enough, quite possibly, to be unsurvivable for many life forms that evolved in the earlier one. And once in a new equilibrium, there's no simple recipe for knocking it back to the old one, either.

I'm not a climatologist, but one thing I believe is keeping them up at night is estimating just how close we'll be getting to that big a knock. Playing chicken with that possibility might be not smart.

 

Actually that's only true for some plants, not for all of them and certainly not for the entire ecological system. Furthermore, a single old growth pine tree for exampel has 1.5 sq miles of leaf surface area... But those types of trees and others like them that are many centuries old have been entirely wiped off the landscape and the ocean's plankton, another powerhouse of carbon absorption are dependent on whales and other marine life providing vital nutrients to thrive, but we're depleting our oceans of life so aggressively, that carbon and heat absorption capacity is no longer functioning properly. I could go on and with a great deal of science in this regard.

 

There are several positive feedback loops though. Warmer ocean water becomes less soluble to gases, leaving more CO2 in the air. Thawed permafrost frees up food for fermenters and decomposers that produce CO2 and methane. Higher temperatures can speed those processes up in other areas. Methylhydrates thaw, releasing methane.

 

Terrestrial and marine carbon sinks are included in an annually updated series, here from 2022

Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 4811–4900, 2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022
Friedlingstein et al.

Here is their Fig 3, and its long caption can be read in source above


Marine uptake is the larger. Both vary across years, terrestrial seems to vary more, but data uncertainty prevents much talk about that. Marine uptake is much less during strong El Nino years.

A strong increase in fossil-C emissions is seen since 1950, and both terrestrial and marine uptake (appear to have) responded to that. Such that, roughly speaking, fossil C emissions since 1950s are about equally divided among atmosphere, land and sea.

It remains unknown whether those uptake rates can continue to increase. A lot has been published on that.

Land plants certainly respond to +CO2, but to cash in they require water and nutrients from soil, and do better if not exposed to hot and dry air. That can cause evapotransipiration rates that 'the plumbing system' cannot keep pace with. In which case plants take the afternoon off. Yrs truly has taken a great interest in that hot and dry air.

Plants also have enemies (herbivores and disease) and those may further constrain CO2 uptake in future. In fact I have fingers in several of those processes. What I cannot describe with any confidence at all is marine C uptake. No fingers at all in there.

I suppose as mentioned above that whales are important. Whaling (or de-whaling oceans if you prefer) peaked around 1960. Populations of many species are recovering since then. It might be tempting to speculate that whale population increases have contributed to marine C uptake thereby, but I am not in a position to say. Many other changes are happening to marine food chains at the same time. Particularly yummy fish populations are being depleted, and driven to smaller sizes among the remaining.

Said it before and now say again. PriusChat needs an oceanographer.

 

The Southern Ocean is famously where much C uptake (and its variation) takes place. It is also famously inhospitable to surface vessels and people on them. For oceanographers to figure it all out requires them to go to that worst place. Ooops.

 

Or do it without crewed ships. Argo autonomous floats dot the oceans, sink and measure various things, and pop back up and transmit data to satellites. They are many and nifty, but few in the Southern Ocean. That's one thing.

Future improved floats are being built to measure additional items of interest. That's another thing.

In a decade or so it will be possible to collect water samples, extract and sequence environmental DNA, all robotically. This is my future vision for super duper Argo floats. Hope you younger ones will see that come to pass.

 

Here is a recent Argo distribution map: