Wandering topic, but probably the best analog of today's rapid CO2 increase is the PETM. No other recent history has the monstrous slug of introduced CO2 like what we are injecting into the atmosphere at the moment.
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Energy Discussion
- Thread starter Treetop Flyer
- Start date
ABMD
Bullets don't fly without Supply
Yup, that's because the second part of my statement. Rhetoric has consequences, when the Energy Sec says she wants to see the US transition away from fossil fuels that is sending a message.
Frackers Hold Back Production as Oil Nears $100 a Barrel
Prices are the highest since 2014, but top shale companies like Devon and Pioneer are choosing to grow slowly rather than drill more.www.wsj.com
This shouldn't be news to anyone though, and it's probably not realistic on the timelines that many have stated as goals. While progress will certainly be made for automobiles and other ground transport modes, air travel, and commercial shipping (which is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels), will remain on fossil fuels for there foreseeable future. Oil companies are quite adept at throttling their production/price to ensure their profit margins endure.
Mankind clearly affects the environment of planet earth in negative ways, including climate, but I have no way of quantifying how much is caused by man and how much is caused by other factors. Scientists still don’t really know what caused the last ice age, nor what brought the planet out of the ice age. Most mainstream scientists assert that the Younger Dryas warming period was gradual - which (if true) would be highly concerning because it implies that the planet just gradually will freeze and melt on occasion with no major causal event, and no one in the scientific community has been able to firmly prove why.
That's quite a mental gymnastic deflection you've laid out - kudos on that. I'll take that as a no.
That’s incorrect of you to infer.
I'll lay it out for you then...
Should developed nations take deliberate steps, sometimes with significant costs, and admittedly without a perfect understanding of causal mechanisms, to reduce reasonably well-understood anthropogenic sources of climate change?
Alternately, should we continue to study climate change in hopes of meeting some undisclosed threshold of scientific certainly you, as a lay person, apparently hold, before taking the aforementioned steps to reduce anthropogenic climate change?
Far be it from me to pigeonhole your thinking, but which of these two options might appeal more to you on the matter?
Agreed, the whole “existential crisis” crowd isn’t particularly helpful, because whatever climate change is, it isn’t that, but there are a whole host of very real threats, from sea level rise, to more frequent impactful weather events, to drought, to refugees. We’re taking steps here at PMRF to provide some climate change resiliency, as we’re just a few feet above sea level. Our neighbors to the East on the Mānā Plain are mostly farming cooperatives that are slightly below sea level. We partner with them to manage irrigation flows, while buttressing our natural system of dunes against erosion, which buys us all time as sea levels rise. Every little bit helps. Not something I ever imagined doing as a Base CO, but it’s an essential part of ensuring our unique capabilities endure here. FWIW, DoD and DoN are fully onboard with this stuff.
Again, you’re trying to present two loose and ill defined concepts as if they are mutually exclusive, and also, as if they are well understood.
I’ll try to break it down for you so you won’t have to do any “mental gymnastics” this time: Humans do bad things to the climate. Humans should do better for the climate and environment. Separately, the climate can also change without humans. It’s been happening for millions of years. Do we know why that happens? Nope, we sure don’t. Do I have an answer for you in terms of policies that humans should adopt to help the climate? Sometimes, yes I do, but not in every case.
My position is that humans must take climate action. I’m all for climate action, like, immediately. Let’s make some changes.
The problem I see is that a lot of the climate action proposals are ill-informed, subjectively applied, wrong-on-science, or unwise. The problem I see is that certain people or groups are villified, shamed, or lectured - often under false or misleading conspiracy theories about climate change.
For example, the removal of ruminants from farms and wild ecosystems is going to bring a massive ecological disaster and accelerate the desertification of our prairies. So all the hate on cows and beef is flat wrong, and will worsen carbon emissions. Check out Alan Savory’s Ted Talk or a host of other, well-researched studies on ruminants, soil health, and soil carbon sequestration. The best and only way to turn deserts into grasslands at scale is through the (re)introduction of ruminants. And yet certain misguided ideologues still call for a tax or outright ban on beef.
Another example, since California is hating on gas engine cars - Why not private jets? Why not mandate, in the name of climate action, that CA airports won’t allow private jets to land or take off unless they are all-electric? Obviously, not only is that impractical, but it also hits wealthier people who own and use private air travel, including CA politicians, celebrities, tech moguls, etc. But that isn’t the narrative CA wants to tell, or the people CA wants to annoy. CA wants the working person with a perfectly good car to go buy a new, electric car. There is also zero research from the “go electric” crowd on the full accounting and scale of environmental costs of hybrid and electric vehicles which includes the full lifecycle of mining, refining, shipping, manufacturing, and end-of-life recycling or disposal of hazardous elements. If someone isn’t factoring in the China-based strip mining to their hybrid car, they are ignoring or hiding the full environmental costs. But that nuance or complexity is lost on most people in the climate crowd who only exist at a superficial level of understanding and love to shout-down alleged “climate deniers.” Not referring to you but a few of my in-laws come to mind, and I’m sure we’ve all met someone in that category at some point.
Lastly, I try to understand the big picture. Some don’t. We could make the US the greenest place on earth, but if all the emissions just get moved to another country via outsourcing, did you really do anything other than pat yourself on the back while maybe weakening the economy? Smog and pollution don’t stop at national borders.
The world is nuanced. The world is gray. Things aren’t so black and white.
And going back to the ice age comments, I think anyone studying climate science would be a fool not to study the full observable climate record of the planet. We don’t know what we don’t know.
Do you have evidence that they don’t? It seems like you’re making a lot of assumptions about the scope of what climate scientists consider, when you don’t have any experience or expertise yourself.
I’m glad you’ve finally declared at least a tacit agreement that anthropogenic climate change is real, and should be acted upon by humans to limit future harm, to the extent that’s possible.
I recommend Tom Nichols “Death of Expertise” for your reading list.
What Triggers Ice Ages?
Earth's climate naturally fluctuates between warm periods and ice ages. What likely caused the last "big chill"?
www.pbs.org
“Although the exact causes for ice ages, and the glacial cycles within them, have not been proven, they are most likely the result of a complicated dynamic interaction between such things as solar output, distance of the Earth from the sun, position and height of the continents, ocean circulation, and the composition of the atmosphere.”
I agree with you that the climate has been cycling for forever, without us causing it. Scientists are definitely studying the past record to look for analogs of our current situation.
The right historical record to study to inform what we might expect, is one where there was a huge fairly sudden increase in CO2. The ice ages weren’t that. The PETM that I referenced in the earlier post was. They don’t know what dumped all of the CO2 into the atmosphere, but they are very sure it happened. We are currently adding it faster now.
In that world, there were reptiles and ferns and other warm weather plants and animals at both poles, which must have been weird because they still had the 24 hour sun and 24 hour darkness in the summer and Fall seasons. The equatorial oceans were too hot to support life, approaching 100 F. The oceans were too acidic for a lot of critters.
And again, the CO2 is rising way faster now, than it did back then. Way, way faster.
The right historical record to study to inform what we might expect, is one where there was a huge fairly sudden increase in CO2. The ice ages weren’t that. The PETM that I referenced in the earlier post was. They don’t know what dumped all of the CO2 into the atmosphere, but they are very sure it happened. We are currently adding it faster now.
In that world, there were reptiles and ferns and other warm weather plants and animals at both poles, which must have been weird because they still had the 24 hour sun and 24 hour darkness in the summer and Fall seasons. The equatorial oceans were too hot to support life, approaching 100 F. The oceans were too acidic for a lot of critters.
And again, the CO2 is rising way faster now, than it did back then. Way, way faster.