> In 1998, Zimov brought the first horses to what he called Pleistocene Park, a fenced tract of land an hour’s boat ride from the research station. Since then, the park has grown to eight square miles, and it is now home to a hundred and fifty animals, not just horses but bison, sheep, yaks, and camels. To give them a head start, Nikita sped about the territory in the family’s “tank”—a hefty, all-terrain transport vehicle on treads—knocking down trees and undergrowth.
For more on the human angle, see this piece, which includes a fascinating video:
I found this to be so fascinating, "At a certain point, nature takes over. Even the most forward-thinking legislature in the world can’t pass a law banning emissions from permafrost."
That’s probably a significantly more difficult problem than stopping pollution as you actually need someone to pay for it directly. And of course we don’t know a good way to only try and cool the Arctic.
<Massive simplifications ahead> You can ballpark this yourself a 288 K black body in equilibrium is radiating as much energy as it receives, at T^4. To drop that by 1C to 287K means blocking 1- ( 287^4 /288^4) or roughly 1.4% of all sunlight. As the earth’s radius 6,371 km ignoring the atmosphere, the classic sunshade at L1 idea needs a surface area of something like 1.7 million km^2. And that’s assuming we didn’t keep dumping any CO2 into the air and ignore the fact the earth isn’t in equilibrium it’s warming etc etc.
A few ideas for getting various things into the upper atmosphere have been considered but reflecting an extra 1.4% or more sunlight would be a true ly Herculean task with any of those ideas and you couldn’t stop as they all decay over time.
Why does every solar geoengineering project seem to pretend that decreasing solar radiation wouldn't impact photosynthesis which also binds CO2, and, uh, supports the entire food web / our civilization?
We already are massively stressing the biosphere: mass extinctions, mass destruction of habitat, mass disruption of migration patterns, warming, plastic pollution, invasive species.
And the suggestion is to reduce incoming photosynthetic energy by percentage points????????
I get that photosynthesis happens in a narrow band of frequencies compared to other solar radiation that would be absorbed then emitted back/trapped as IR radiation... but still, geoengineering should focus on methods that explicitly track the bound/removed CO2.
Note I do not for a second believe that schemes for sequestration by pumping CO2 deep underground won't have huge amounts of ignored/undetected leakage, especially since it is a petroleum industry scheme that already pretends massive methane leaks aren't occurring far more than is accounted for in current petrol extraction.
Solar engineering is interesting because we've already observed it, for periods of a year or two after major volcanic eruptions. Those have put enough sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to block about one percent of sunlight, and disaster did not ensue.
Since the sulfur dioxide goes away after a year or two, if it does start to cause a problem then you can simply stop emitting it. However, if you absolutely want to avoid potential impact on crops, another proposed method is to use a fleet of wind-driven ships, seeding low-lying clouds over the oceans.
As for storing CO2 underground, there is one method that might work: pumping it into basalt formations, where it turns into rock in about a year. There are several pilot projects doing this.
I'm not trying to demonize you pointing this out, but the semantics of this is interesting and typical of modern engineering, and it is in the same blind spot that economics has...
No I'm not interested in crops as all. I don't care about farm yields, profitability, market fluctuations, food supply or all.
I am concerned about the stability and long term survival of the biosphere. Yes, so that we don't go extinct, but more that that, so that we aren't living in domes in a no longer life supporting planet.
Of course, engineering (and economics) are disciplines that can only work on the basis of things they can measure. Your statement basically refers to something that is measurable: crops and crop yields.
But do we have economic or engineering measurements of the health of local and global biomes, beyond "wow they are a lot worse than they used to be"? Do we have any way of saying "this engineering project or economic policy will result in this degradation to the almost infinitely complex natures of habitats and biomes? We do not. We don't even really have good approximations.
What is disturbing is that the approximations we DO have, like species extinctions, population declines in top species, qualitative observations of ecosystems, go functionally and absolutely ignored in policy, and by economics. Engineering, which produces the only hopes of technological solutions to our problems, still is riddled with the "make it work, don't worry that much about side effects" (well, since that's all the management and budget economics allow).
I harp on engineers in this case because in my experience they are strangely conservative and republican, and by extension, anti-environment. I believe this is because every large engineering project has this stage:
"The environmental impact review"
Which is a huge blob of uncertainty, and engineers hate uncertainty. And therefore, by human nature, they hate the thing the uncertainty surrounds. And so they hate environmental reviews, and they hate the environment.
I completely agree that we need to protect the whole biosphere, so please s/crops/biosphere, that was my bad.
At this point, sadly, geoengineering may be a necessary part of protecting it. We're on the verge of positive feedbacks that could take things out of our hands, as the planet starts emitting vast amounts of greenhouse gases with no more help from us. If all we do is stop emissions, there's a good chance that we'll cross that tipping point before we're done. It's possible that we've already crossed it.
From the articles I've seen, about a year, maybe two. Similar chemistry to olivine I think, but the idea is to use more concentrated CO2 from DAC or fossil exhaust, and pump to basalt formations deep underground. The olivine schemes I've seen use it as beach sand, absorbing CO2 from air in a weathering process.
Nominative determinism that might have been missed by non-Slavophones: Zimov would translate to (belonging to winter), like the English surname, Winters.
It's not new news. This idea (i.e., permafrost thaw) has been circulating for quite some time. I'm sure I've read similar at least three times previously, probably more.
The New Yorker's climate coverage is fantastic and terrifying. Look for articles by Elizabeth Kolbert, particularly the one's she did back in '05 - The Climate of Man I, II and III
That came to mind, of course. I even used to have one! I cancelled it at some point because a) I could no longer stomach reading about US politics and b) I'm generally not much of a subcription guy. I might eventually pick it up again.
I read somewhere that the soil is the problem, not just the local climate. And soil takes a long time to accumulate the good stuff. So in short, places with good soil will become less farmable and places with now better climate won’t have good soil. We’re all kinda screwed then.
Mmm. Modern fertilizer has done a lot to neutralize the importance of good soil.
You can't farm rocks, but the US west has done a lot with sand + fertilizer.
As long as you have money, water, sun, heat, and something better than bedrock, I wouldn't call it unrealistic.
There's been a bad loss of topsoil in "good" farming areas but I don't think aggressive farming of marginal soil or subsoil in arid areas does much extra damage on top of natural erosion.
What are trying to find relevance to? I was just responding to the comment saying we are screwed if we can't plant things in the ground...
On a longer time scale, the thaw absolutely has impacts on many things. Over time the soil WILL develop fertility, if we are around or not at that point idk.
I wonder how many more trees are going to grow on the defrosted land. Siberia is basically one enormous birch forest already [0]. I assume that as the land warms that treeline is going to advance north.
[0] I rode the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Ulan Bator, and it was days of the exact same scenery: birch trees lining the railway, with the occasional breathtaking scene that was just often enough to keep me staring at trees most of the trip.
Not just farmable. Much better farmable like these days in my old town back in Russia. Though in exchange children have seen practically no snow there in the last 20 years.
More like not much: the soil is non-existent, and because the latitude and weather remains dreadful the growing seasons are short.
Furthermore Siberia will not be exempt from climactic instability, meaning unpredictable weather events (limited seasonal regularity) making YoY farming planning extremely difficult.
Not only that, but the thawing creates extremely unstable ground, leading to very irregular subsidence.
The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. Filtering out methane and CO₂ is routine for life-support systems in submarines, spacecraft, and, yes, bunkers, so it's not infeasible. The problem is that they cause global warming, not toxicity, and we can't build an isolated sealed compound to protect the planet from them.
EDIT: kragen, I am being throttled so here is my response to your below comment:
When there is plenty arguments and scientific consensus to the contrary, and the person presents numbers obviously derived from thin air, I think it is fair to state the person does not know what they are talking about.
Toxicology is a complex topic. But it is safe to say CO2 becomes toxic way before it becomes lethal. Which is to say you see adverse effects even before the concentration reaches lethal level. It may maybe take hundreds of times before it becomes immediately lethal but it is already toxic at about current concentration or 2-5 times current concentration, depending on who you ask, and not "hundreds of times" higher.
It's true that high CO₂ levels cause cognitive impairment, but submarines routinely operate for months in the 2000–5000 ppm range, sometimes as high as 13000 ppm, over 30 times higher than the current atmospheric level but still too low to kill people by about a factor of 8. Subtle cognitive impairments at these levels have been found by some researchers, while others have been unable to replicate them even at 30000 ppm: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29789085/https://www.nap.edu/read/11170/chapter/5#54
That's why the NOAEL is set at 25000 ppm, at which point CO₂ starts to cause visual disturbances, which I think fall short of "toxicity"; it's more like a recreational drug effect. If the Earth's atmosphere reached 100 times the current level, 40000 ppm CO₂ (4%!), you still wouldn't have a CO₂ toxicity problem in humans. However, you probably wouldn't have a biosphere much longer either, and at that point toxicity to humans would be a moot point.
Also, by the way, the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about." Sometimes people might disagree with you because they know things you don't, for example because their information doesn't come from science popularizers, rather than because they don't know things you do. If you don't keep that in mind, you are likely to embarrass yourself frequently. Believe me, I have a lot of experience doing that.
> "the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.""
As a casual observer trying to follow the conversation and learn more, I would prefer to hear just the facts with the data to support it, rather than the personal attacks regardless of whether you think they’re fair or not.
I’m not tone policing if that’s what you’re suggesting. If that is indeed what you’re suggesting, then the failure in comprehension is your own.
My criticism is not about how something was said. My criticism is specifically about what was said, in that I found it irrelevant.
I’d like to learn more about the topic, but I can’t learn anything about the topic from personal judgements made about an interlocutor. It’s just noise and detracts from the argument being made.
Filtering carbon dioxide to have breathing air at home isn't difficult. But housing 8 billion people in sealed environment is.
The trouble with CO2 is that already the amount of it in atmosphere starts making us measurably dumber and it is only going to get worse.
1000ppm is a badly ventilated room that causes headache and poor performance on tasks. Imagine experiencing this for your entire life. Imagine ALL kids having trouble with concentration, entire Earth's population getting dumber. As if we did not have problems already...
Removing CO2 from atmosphere is still much, much more expensive than alternatives. People just don't seem to understand the vastness of our atmosphere and the scale of operations that would be needed for this.
Our atmosphere weighs ~5 quadrillion (5x10^15) tonnes. We are talking about an apparatus that can suck that amount of gas and process it to remove CO2 that is already very dilute.
The sarcasm is fine, but I have no sense of whether or not the point is even valid. Do you have any back of the napkin maths to illustrate how effective covering the Earth’s land masses in trees would be, even if we could terraform all the big deserts? Planting a load of trees is at least actionable, but I wonder if it’s also futile.
Phytoplankton is what makes oxygen from CO2. Trees actually do not add much. IMO we should bioengineer phytoplankton to allow it to grow faster, so our oceans will just turn more CO2 into O2 and solve that issue.
... and in the process destabilize every other ecosystem in the ocean? I think that's a dangerous direction to go into without further insights into what kind unintended consequences there might be.
You are right, Earth does have mechanisms through which it regulates the CO2 and tries to bring it back to "balance". But it is important to note that these mechanics (e.g. increased in weathering) take 10s-100s of thousands of years to take effect.
There are faster, more responsive mechanism that actually saved us from most of the problem for past decades. CO2 gets dissolved in ocean water very efficiently causing acidification and getting into other reactions.
Unfortunately, it seems oceans are loosing their ability to buffer CO2 and this may cause sharper increase in atmospheric CO2.
The earth doesn’t “regulate” CO2. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past. There are natural process which just happen to capture or release CO2, but there is no “right” level of CO2.
"and twice as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere. "
"As levels of carbon dioxide rose from 550ppm to 945ppm to 1400ppm, subjects’ scores under most headings declined substantially. (Problem-solving ability also seemed to suffer as levels of volatile organic compounds rose.)"
"2,000-5,000 ppm: level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air; poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present. > 5,000 ppm: This indicates unusual air conditions where high levels of other gases also could be present."
"Based on preliminary analysis, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2020 was 412.5 parts per million (ppm for short), setting a new record high amount despite the economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
Many stressors have an adaptation phase. It is plausible those effects get reduced with prolonged exposure in humans although that wasn't necessarily the case in mice: "Long-term exposure of mice to 890 ppm atmospheric CO 2 alters growth trajectories and elicits hyperactive behaviours in young adulthood"
I feel like if it was many years ago lead pollution would be a nearly insurmountable confounder in such a study, but if you could find it I am sure it would be an interesting read.
Once the permafrost starts melting off, there isn’t much time left for us. Hold your children tight, and comfort them for the rest of their short lives.
The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1]
I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated and pushed back every five years, and nobody seems to be held accountable for it.
Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive?
The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to.
We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels now in much of the world, and PV definitely can scale up to replace fossil fuels, and wind probably can too. So in 8–16 years we enter an era of unprecedented energy abundance, similar to the First Industrial Revolution. There are relatively straightforward ways to use this abundant energy to capture atmospheric CO₂. I outlined one in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736.
It's a complex adaptive system where different regions/countries have already drawn their own geologic, solar, and atmospheric straws. Just because PV and wind are pushing back fossil fuels at market rates now doesn't mean entrenched fossil-fuel-deposit-rich nations will throw up their hands, turn off the pumps/mines, and go all-renewable. If wholesale fossil remains unit-profitable to extract and burn for some purpose (say, converting into crypto--or just because 40% of the value of your oil reserves minus cost is still greater than what you have in the bank), there will be a reason to burn it.
On the other side, too, there will be people whose livelihoods come to depend on a different kind of extraction.
There are surely economic niches where fossil fuels will survive for much longer than the 8–16-year transition period I'm talking about, for example in submarines and circumpolar research stations, but I think the picture for fossil fuels is considerably less rosy than you suggest. Burning fossil fuels requires not only continuing operational expenses to extract them from the ground but also capital expenditures to build machines to burn them with, unless you're just heating your house. And nowadays either the opex or the capex costs more than PV in many places.
Yes, undoubtedly ExxonMobil and Mohammed bin Salman will try to arrest this trend, just as Peabody Coal did. They'll fight like the devil. But they can't force their customers to pay them more than those customers would pay to get the same energy, ammonia, or Bitcoins from a renewable-energy-powered source. If it costs less to replace coal with solar power than to dig it out of the ground, it will stay in the ground. And that's why Peabody went bankrupt and ExxonMobil has been losing money since 02019.
But how could that play out? If you're Mohammed bin Salman and you want to maximize your earnings from the oil left in Ghawar and the smaller fields, stipulating that you believe the international oil market will be vastly smaller in a decade or two, how do you do it?
Anything you can convince yourself isn't losing money.
I suppose that math can get very weird if countries factor in expected appreciation of crypto they plan to hold. And even weirder if they end up perceiving a geopolitical stake in maintaining a certain fraction of the global hash rate.
Wouldn't just a change in the way we view our economy work? If a lot of the emissions come from creating GDP, why not take a break, live off our assets,like when Covid initially happened... i'd continue but would probably get buried as a utopian (tbh it seems like businesses a machines getting people create more machines while getting very little actual return...)
Really? Let's take the case of Switzerland, everyone wants to go there, they are literally spending money to supress the increasing exchange rate to avoid a collaps of exports... what would happen if they took a years break.. I mean maybe it would be better, letting the CHF, go higher , allowing the swiss to leave to greener pastures, allowing others to visit such a beautiful country (and use the empty living space from departed swiss , foreigners)...
Maybe what we need is radical capitalism, but all we have the balls for is corporate nepotism?
A year's break? You mean, nobody work for a year? The death rate would skyrocket as the Swiss died from easily treatable medical problems like appendicitis. Everyone in a nursing home would be dead after a few days, and you'd have mass starvation and riots in every city within weeks. No food would be planted or harvested, so even when the truckers and supermarket workers began to work again the starvation would not end. Politicians in neighboring countries would invade to "restore order" and reopen the banks where their savings are stored.
I'm sorry on what planet do you live? Up to the point of food (and probably after) I was thinking you were being ironic, but though HN are reputed for humor, could you not humour me and explain why food prices would skyrocket? Basic foodstuffs are cheap, even in Switzerland, 500g of good cheap brown bread at Migros cost 1$... noone is taking noones savings away, according to google Switzerland spent almost 17B$supporting the swiss franc in 2021...
yes the common joke is swiss are apoplectic at having to stop work (thereby dying of appendicitis?) however reality is they have one of the highest suicide rates currently , due to burnout? and imo are a society where fear of the future is one prevalently to keep (people)change in check...
If everyone "takes a break", then how does your average city dweller acquire food? The naieve reading of the phrase "why not take a break" would imply that no one is staffing the supermarkets, no one is driving trucks to deliver food to supermarkets, no one is farming at commercial scale, etc.
Perhaps you need more specificity in what "take a break" means.
Flag? Really... that's mean :-) but here goes I'll try to answer your questions/concerns and those of 0xfff2 in one go "You mean, nobody work for a year?" Yes, to the extent they want to do something why not look at it and see if it's usefull, helpful, or just using their time and polluting the environment?
Once the obligation to go to work goes away, habits, needs, wants, perspective change
"Everyone in a nursing home would be dead after a few days," this statement I don't understand, I've been in EMS's as the french speakers call them.... and beyond having a high cost, many of those old people could be adequately cared for at home...or use a helper occasionally in a much more efficient/economical manner
"No food would be planted or harvested, so even when the truckers and supermarket workers began to work again the starvation would not end"
Figures say ...? 6% of imports are food and beverages..., when people have time they cook, so use of basic foodstuffs would go up, that of expensive, overly packaged foodstuffs (dissapear) one would hope, I answered this question inasmuch as pointing out food in general is cheap... Switzerland is currently sitting on a huge amount of wealth that is stuck in real estate, pressure for an appreciating CHf (on which they are using debt to counter more than 2k per Swiss person)
"no one is staffing the supermarkets, no one is driving trucks to deliver food to supermarkets, no one is farming at commercial scale"
Open markets are a thing, self driving trucks too, automatic check outs ...vending machines...as for commercial farming it's gotten out of hand... I studied horticulture and personally avoid supermarket food in Switzerland, it's tastless, expensive and in many cases over packaged... come to Eastern Europe...for flavour,
If people were to have more free time, don't you think, the great outside , gardening, cooking and sharing good food would be one of their préoccupations?
A simple google search turns up
"It has one of the highest sucide rates in Europe, in 2014, 1,029 people committed non-assisted suicide (754 men, 275 women), for a rate of 12.5 per 100,000 (18.5 male, 6.6 female). Not included are 742 assisted suicides (320 men, 422 women); most of the assisted suicides concerned elderly people suffering from a terminal disease."
Tldr I understand the misgivings my "naive" statements produce, but plead for people to open their minds to other potential lifestyles that could really help combat CC...
Yes, I do think gardening would be a leisure activity many people would enjoy if they had more free time, but the difference between leisure gardening and what you seem to be suggesting --- subsistence farming --- is enormously greater than you are imagining, even though you have studied horticulture.
Your fundamental error is that you think food, medical care, etc., are bought with money. In fact, they are bought with labor, natural resources ("land"), and capital goods, all three of which are necessary. Money is just a consensual hallucination, a board game people play to allocate the labor and food and so on. If nobody is laboring, there will be no production, so money can only buy things which have already been produced. Food will stop being cheap immediately if it is not being produced.
Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground.
Taking the metaphor literally...
You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the rubble so that you can think about eventually rebuilding your house on that land.
Yes, it's discouraging, yes it's demoralizing. But humanity (and individual humans) has faced all sorts of extreme adversity over our history. As living creatures we have a survival instinct that requires us to continue fighting. Yes, this particular crisis is our own creation. Yes, it will damage the Earth and our specific ecosystem more than any other action we've ever done in our short time here. Yes, we might have a generation or several generations globally who will have a worse quality of life than the previous one for the first time in several hundreds of years. Yes, it's frustrating that this was caused by selfish greedy humans who will never be held accountable for it, and who will most likely have to coexist with, and collaborate on solutions when they finally decide when it's too late.
Nevertheless, we persevere, and we each do what we can to minimize the damage, to innovate solutions that may protect that what remains, and we think long-long-term.
Our ancestors frequently knew that they were a part of something much bigger and that the impact they could have had on the world or improving the lives of their children were miniscule. Yet they did so anyway. We have been brought up in a generation of boundless optimism thinking that we would all change the world for the better, while living in continuously growing prosperity. Not all of that turned out to be true. That's okay. We still keep going.
Understand, I did not start out with this point of view. I'm not an optimist by nature. I spent years being depressed and fatalist as you might be. I chose this mindset as a survival tactic. But I do believe everything I wrote.
I think its both valuable and important to recognize that the climate change is inevitable so that we can stop talking about how we might prevent it, and start talking about how we can sustain our civilization regardless of the weather. (How would we sustain ourselves if we lived in a satellite orbiting the sun?)
I also think neither democracy or capitalism is well equipped to ask people to make large sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. I think we should stop talking about people making sacrifices, and put effort into engineering our way out of this problem.
I'm certain, that more refined forms of democracy and capitalism would be well adapted to help find solutions to CC, structurally though things are very (too) slow to change and few people have a more holistic view
Ultimately it took a external event like Covid to shake things up and show the way...ie less work, less consumerism, less flying and polluting Cruise ships... but the machine/auto industry continues to dominate, as do inefficient work practices which just serve to feed the bank accounts of the middle class....
I'm currently in Egypt living on 300$ a month, learning arabic and enjoying life... why freeze yourself/heat the planet, instead of WFH or not at all a few hundred miles south... people are dumb and the internet is generally making them dumber The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Oliver Carr
This is an incredibly new development and is based entirely on prosperity.
For most of history of democracy and capitalism, individuals made altruistic choices for their own future generations - not for humanity, but for their own children.
It's only during the post-war boom (and only in the countries that were undamaged by the war) did automatic prosperity become the ubiquitous expectation.
And even in that context, immigrant parents made similar sacrifices.
What about temperatures up to 49 degrees Celsius, like the heatwave in India back in 2019? If the air is moist, it can become literally impossible for even healthy humans to survive without some external way of cooling off.
I just realized that perhaps the problem is not global warming. Perhaps the problem is that we are having children. If we all just decided to stop having kids, nobody would care what the weather was like at the end of the century.
With the right partner, kids (depending on how you see it) make you work less,(if you decide to take time to help them grow) enjoy life more (hilarious situations) and grow as a person (suppress your ego)
The good thing is they grow up fast and are the closest thing to positive change we can potentially actively have a hand in... also according to book quoted on HN the upper limit of human population is 1 trillion... so all we really need to do is work less, stop useless packaging and wasteful bureaucracy, enjoy life more and eat better by transforming the junk food (glucose syrup, wheat, rye (beer u and meat agriculture into a refugee(from work) based garden of nuts fruits and veg
Try watching a french film called Demain (Tomorrow) ...plenty of immediate great solutions out there
