[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

Yonder wrote:

The Japanese are now helping the Chinese fake climate change evidence!! (/s)

That news is dispiriting, but the length of time the first bloom has been tracked is really awesome. The Cherry Blossoms here in DC certainly seemed thrown off by that warm spell we had at the end of February this year.

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain has gone entirely without coal:

NG Control Room wrote:

National Grid can confirm that for the past 24 hours, it has supplied GB's electricity demand without the need for #coal generation.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9-Aan-XoAASlvX.jpg)

Today's average generation mix so far has been gas 50.3%, nuclear 21.2%, wind 12.2%, imports 8.3%, biomass 6.7%, solar 3.6%

Yay! I posted the same thing on Facebook but almost no one liked it - the vast majority of people just don't care...

Crucially those 8.3% imports were mostly from France and... some other country, and those countries weren't using Coal either.

When you are just trading coal for another fossil fuel, does it really matter?

It does! Natural Gas produces less than half the amount of CO2 to make the same amount of electricity as an equivalent (as in, modern) coal plant. I'm not sure why, my guess would be that the Natural Gas plants are burning hotter, and thus more efficiently.

Yonder wrote:

It does! Natural Gas produces less than half the amount of CO2 to make the same amount of electricity as an equivalent (as in, modern) coal plant. I'm not sure why, my guess would be that the Natural Gas plants are burning hotter, and thus more efficiently.

I'm pretty sure it's because coal is just carbon to CO2 while natural gas is a hydrocarbon mix to CO2 and H2O. So you're getting energy from oxidizing both Carbon and Hydrogen.

Long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries, are reviving as Earth's climate warms

Movies tried to warn us about this.

The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost. There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed.

oh fun!

The Guardian: Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts:
No seeds were lost but the ability of the rock vault to provide failsafe protection against all disasters is now threatened by climate change

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.

That story, as written, doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems more likely that there is a problem with the design of the entrance to the facility than there is a problem with the permafrost thawing on a large scale. It's hard to say without more information, but I think this is probably an engineering story more that a climate story. Permafrost engineering is fascinating and difficult, so the story could be interesting if told from that perspective, but the climate-change angle in this one seems pretty weak.

I also keep hoping that journalists will eventually realize that permafrost thaws, it doesn't melt. That mistake grates my nerves every time I read it.

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

That's not its purpose. The Global Seed Vault functions as a backup to other, more accessible seed banks in case something happens to them. It's basically genetic diversity insurance.

ah right, derp, thanks for the clarification OG

krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

I'd watch that movie.

Jonman wrote:
krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

I'd watch that movie.

Matt Damon I heard is attached to it.

TheGameguru wrote:
Jonman wrote:
krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

I'd watch that movie.

Matt Damon I heard is attached to it.

Never mind then.

TheGameguru wrote:
Jonman wrote:
krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

I'd watch that movie.

Matt Damon I heard is attached to it.

The mission is actually to rescue Matt Damon, who has somehow gotten locked in the vault, but they figure they may as well grab some seeds while they are there.

krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

The idea isn't (so much) that all crops will be destroyed in some catastrophic event. The more likely case is "some plague, or pest, or something, wipes out one or multiple species" (like has happened with the earlier form of banana, and has basically happened with the American Chestnut). Once the issue has been addressed, either in localized areas or globally, the seeds from the vault can be used to reclaim the species.

But which species will that happen too? Well, could be any of them, so you have to store all of them (or as many as you can).

Jonman wrote:
krev82 wrote:

The notion that some rag-tag band of human survivors of whatever disaster could somehow get down there, get into the seed bank, and restore the world's crops always seemed rather grandiose to me anyway.

I'd watch that movie.

it even gets better:

Though the facility will be fenced in and guarded, Svalbard's free-roaming polar bears, known for their ferocity, could also act as natural guardians.

Like Deathclaws, but fuzzy and white!

Leo will lead the bear fighting expedition to save Matt Damon. He'll have to fight the polar bear defending Leo from Before the Flood.

A small bit of good news: Ocean Absorption of Carbon Dioxide More than Makes Up for Methane Emissions from Seafloor Methane Seeps

The key seems to be the marine phytoplankton that congregate around the seeps, which are remarkably effective at using co2 for photosynthesis.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

A small bit of good news: Ocean Absorption of Carbon Dioxide More than Makes Up for Methane Emissions from Seafloor Methane Seeps

The key seems to be the marine phytoplankton that congregate around the seeps, which are remarkably effective at using co2 for photosynthesis.

Related.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

A small bit of good news: Ocean Absorption of Carbon Dioxide More than Makes Up for Methane Emissions from Seafloor Methane Seeps

The key seems to be the marine phytoplankton that congregate around the seeps, which are remarkably effective at using co2 for photosynthesis.

I initially read this incorrectly. I don't think the way to think about this is that this is big positive news, as it doesn't matter a hill of beans. This is just work to understand how things work. In a sense, we had to know that these vents weren't a huge impactor on greenhouse gases. If they were, we'd have had a runaway greenhouse effect already (presuming we don't live at an odd time in the history of methane seepage!). This study just shows us how this particular mechanism in the ocean works, allowing us to include its effects in our models.

(The article is much better than their press release version.)

Well, more specifically, it's not a big problem yet. Depending on the chemical and/or physical processes involved, at some point the methane releases may not be compensated for by the CO2 consumption. There may be some other element that's not available in sufficient supply, or perhaps the plankton just won't be able to keep up, at which point they'd get overwhelmed, and we'd have a runaway greenhouse after all. For instance, we're dependent on the the ratio of sediment to methane; if the methane starts gassing off faster, that doesn't automatically mean more sediment will be showing up.

So it's good news, yes, but it may not be as good as it first seems.

I just meant good in that we've discovered another way to potentially sequester carbon if we can figure out a way to scale up what the phytoplankton are doing.

Even if the methodology those phytoplankton are using is different from the handful of photosynthesis pathways we already know I think it's unlikely that it will give us too much of of an insight into another method of carbon capture.

Yonder wrote:

Even if the methodology those phytoplankton are using is different from the handful of photosynthesis pathways we already know I think it's unlikely that it will give us too much of of an insight into another method of carbon capture.

sure but that's a truism when it comes to science.