Solution to Anthropogenic Climate Change?

[Red Baron Farms]

There is no lowering of carbon emission in that quote. It is lowering of atmospheric CO2 by any means and that it does not happen.

Then I went on to climate change mitigation strategies which are ways expected to reduce global warming to acceptable levels by 2100.

Lowering carbon emissions will reduce global warming to acceptable levels ("stop global warming "). That may include lowering atmospheric CO2 over the next 80 years.

Again you just quoted the damn thing. You said it yourself. "The reference says not lowering atmospheric CO2 will cause temperatures to increase over the next few thousand years."

Bingo. Reducing emissions is not enough. We must actually lower accumulated CO2.

Lowering emissions is part of the strategy to reduce and then reverse AGW, but it requires also increasing the other side of the carbon cycle. Increasing sequestration. This is the only way to reach a net negative emissions rate and lower atmospheric CO2 and reverse AGW..

 

[Reality Check]

Give your scientific sources

Lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough. You literally just contradicted yourself.

A bit of reading incomprehension, Red Baron Farms. Listing the effects of the levels of carbon emissions is science, not a contradiction.
If carbon emissions increase then obviously global warming increases!
If carbon emissions stay the same then global warming increases!
If carbon emissions decrease then global warming deceases!
If carbon emissions decrease a lot (e.g. to zero) then global warming deceases!
It is not just "fossil fuel emissions", I wrote "carbon emissions". The two biggest contributors are cement production and use, and burning fossil fuels.

Same question that you should have asked on reading the article.
Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough to mitigate global warming, Red Baron Farms.

Ask yourself why climate scientists emphasize lowering carbon emissions.
Ask yourself why climate change treaties emphasize lowering carbon emissions.

 

[Reality Check]

Again Reducing emissions is not enough.

Again you are wrong, Red Baron Farms. One more time:
The reference says not lowering atmospheric CO2 will cause temperatures to increase over the next few thousand years.
The scenario is not lowering atmospheric CO2.
The scenario is not climate change migration which is for the next 80 years, not thousands of years.

Reducing emissions is not mentioned.
Carbon sequestration is not mentioned.
Geoengineering is not mentioned.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

A bit of reading incomprehension, Red Baron Farms. Listing the effects of the levels of carbon emissions is science, not a contradiction.
If carbon emissions increase then obviously global warming increases!
If carbon emissions stay the same then global warming increases!
If carbon emissions decrease then global warming deceases!
If carbon emissions decrease a lot (e.g. to zero) then global warming deceases!
It is not just "fossil fuel emissions", I wrote "carbon emissions". The two biggest contributors are cement production and use, and burning fossil fuels.

Same question that you should have asked on reading the article.
Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough to mitigate global warming, Red Baron Farms.

Ask yourself why climate scientists emphasize lowering carbon emissions.
Ask yourself why climate change treaties emphasize lowering carbon emissions.

If carbon emissions increase then obviously global warming increases! yesIf carbon emissions stay the same then global warming increases!yesIf carbon emissions decrease then global warming deceases!no! wrong! still increases for thousands of years!If carbon emissions decrease a lot (e.g. to zero) then global warming deceases!No wrongStill increases for thousands of years!
It is not just "fossil fuel emissions", I wrote "carbon emissions". The two biggest contributors of fossil carbon are cement production and use, and burning fossil fuels. Cement is part of it but relatively small compared to fossil fuels. Either way, cutting them to zero still results in warming for thousands of years based on CURRENT accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere.
That's what the study says. Now if you want to go against what the study says and claim just reducing emissions is enough to actually lower accumulated atmospheric CO2 enough to halt global warming, then you better find a different citation.

I suggest trying a "merchants of doubt" website for denialist junk science like that. It certainly isn't the consensus from any mainstream body of science.

As for why we need to lower emissions, that's trivially easy. Since the goal is a net negative emissions rate, then lowering emissions gets us 1/2 way there. Then we need to increase the sequestration side of the carbon cycle, which can then actually lower atmospheric CO2.


We need to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions

 

[Reality Check]

Give your scientific sources

If carbon emissions decrease a lot (e.g. to zero) then global warming deceases!No wrongStill increases for thousands of years!...

The reference says not lowering atmospheric CO2 will cause temperatures to increase over the next few thousand years.

Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions to zero leaves global warming increasing for thousands of years, Red Baron Farms.

Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough to mitigate global warming, Red Baron Farms.
Good first source so now we need a few more.
We need to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions

Getting climate change under control is a formidable, multifaceted challenge. Analysis by my colleagues and me suggests that staying within safe warming levels now requires removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The technology to do this is in its infancy and will take years, even decades, to develop, but our analysis suggests that this must be a priority. If pushed, operational large-scale systems should be available by 2050.

We created a simple climate model and looked at the implications of different levels of carbon in the ocean and the atmosphere. This lets us make projections about greenhouse warming, and see what we need to do to limit global warming to within 1.5℃ of pre-industrial temperatures – one of the ambitions of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

This is actually not a paper on mitigating global warming to acceptable levels as in treaties and most papers. "The Paris climate agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and ideally no higher than 1.5℃" and then Rohling selects a 1℃ limit because the same happened in the "Eemian period, 125,000 years ago" with sea levels up to 10 meters higher than present We may have already crossed that threshold. But there has been no modern up to 10 meter rise in sea levels!

Note that Eelco Rohling does not list changes in farming as a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The underlying paper is Young People's Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions by James Hansen et. al. which does have "improved agricultural and forestry practices, including reforestation and steps to improve soil fertility and increase its carbon content,".

 

[Red Baron Farms]

The reference says not lowering atmospheric CO2 will cause temperatures to increase over the next few thousand years.

Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions to zero leaves global warming increasing for thousands of years, Red Baron Farms.

Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough to mitigate global warming, Red Baron Farms.

I am done talking to idiots. If you cant do basic carbon cycle pool math...then it is impossible to go forward. There just isn't going to be any scientific paper saying "to lower atmospheric CO2 requires negative emissions." That is like asking for a scientific paper saying 412 ppm CO2 + x = 300 ppm but not understanding x must be a negative 112 ppm CO2.

Scientific papers generally don't need to teach people how to count.



Why you personally are so stuck on this is beyond unreasonable. It is asinine. You are stubbornly acting like an idiot. Presumably on purpose, since I know you are not really an idiot.

However, if you want some sort of ultra basic primer explaining that reducing net emissions to zero is not enough, simply try and read the link I gave you above. #24

 

[This is The End]

I have no issues against Nuclear where appropriate.

Gotta love when the debunking of the sentence is in the very sentence itself.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Gotta love when the debunking of the sentence is in the very sentence itself.

It's true that I did not define "appropriate". But we can imagine "appropriate" meaning in a stable technically advanced enough nation with land areas not subject to high risk of earthquake and volcanism etc... These are relatively common though, so certainly a majority of the civilized world should be capable of using nuclear energy generated electricity as a significant portion of their grid. Of course where it is the cheapest low carbon alternative. Hydroelectric and wind can often be cheaper. In certain cases even solar too.

 

[lomiller]

"Is there a technically viable and economically advantageous solution to Climate Change?"

Yes.

"and what is preventing its implementation?"

Ideology on all sides (and that includes the link - pure ideology).

We know how to dramatically reduce emissions because several countries have done it successfully - but none since we started actually "trying" to reduce emissions.

France did it. Ontario did it. South Korea did it - all in the late 70s and 80s. None have come close since because the successful method clashes will the ideology of the greens.

The major problems with Nuclear power are a) it's not economically competitive and b) in it's current state the technology itself is not a technically viable substitute for fossil fuels on a global scale.

 

[Reality Check]

I am done talking to idiots....

Insults are not a good debate tactic, Red Baron Farms.
Demanding that I do "basic carbon cycle pool math" that you have not done in this thread is not a good debate tactic, Red Baron Farms.

Nor is misrepresenting my question: Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough to mitigate global warming, Red Baron Farms.
There are no negative emissions in that question!

Nor is a display of inability to understand a post when I wrote about the link you gave in post #24 and even gave you the paper that article is based on.

We need to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions

This is actually not a paper on mitigating global warming to acceptable levels as in treaties and most papers. "The Paris climate agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and ideally no higher than 1.5℃" and then Rohling selects a 1℃ limit because the same happened in the "Eemian period, 125,000 years ago" with sea levels up to 10 meters higher than present We may have already crossed that threshold. But there has been no modern up to 10 meter rise in sea levels!

Note that Eelco Rohling does not list changes in farming as a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The underlying paper is Young People's Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions by James Hansen et. al. which does have "improved agricultural and forestry practices, including reforestation and steps to improve soil fertility and increase its carbon content,".

My doubts about the article and paper is the choice of 1 ℃ when the accord limits are below 2 ℃ or ideally below 1.5 ℃. The Eemian period had "Sea level at peak was probably 6 to 9 metres (20 to 30 feet) higher than today" and global temperatures "around 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 Fahrenheit) warmer than that of the Holocene". We have just probably passed the [Eemian temperatures. But we have not had a sea level rise of over 6 meters (yet)! That suggests that modern conditions are different and the comparison is incorrect. Sea level rises - Projections for the 21st century up to 2100 range from about 1 meter (IPCC 2013) to "several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years" (Jim Hansen, the lead author of the above paper).

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Insults are not a good debate tactic, Red Baron Farms.
Demanding that I do "basic carbon cycle pool math" that you have not done in this thread is not a good debate tactic, Red Baron Farms.

Nor is misrepresenting my question: Give your scientific sources that state that lowering fossil fuel emissions is not enough to mitigate global warming, Red Baron Farms.
There are no negative emissions in that question!

Nor is a display of inability to understand a post when I wrote about the link you gave in post #24 and even gave you the paper that article is based on.

My doubts about the article and paper is the choice of 1 ℃ when the accord limits are below 2 ℃ or ideally below 1.5 ℃. The Eemian period had "Sea level at peak was probably 6 to 9 metres (20 to 30 feet) higher than today" and global temperatures "around 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 Fahrenheit) warmer than that of the Holocene". We have just probably passed the [Eemian temperatures. But we have not had a sea level rise of over 6 meters (yet)! That suggests that modern conditions are different and the comparison is incorrect. Sea level rises - Projections for the 21st century up to 2100 range from about 1 meter (IPCC 2013) to "several meters in 50, 100 or 200 years" (Jim Hansen, the lead author of the above paper).

No That is not what it suggests. It simply means we have not reached stability at CURRENT levels of CO2 yet. (radiative balance) Much less the addition point based on future emissions. If we cut all emissions 100% tomorrow, both fossil fuel and cement, then we still keep warming for hundreds or thousands of years based on CURRENT levels of CO2. Until one day far in the future we finally reach radiative balance again. This paper projects thousands of years rather than hundreds to achieve radiative balance. I have seen other papers claiming far less. But all pretty much agree that we are far from that point now and it takes significant time for temps to catch up because we raised CO2 so quickly.

In order to prevent that we must LOWER CO2 in the atmosphere. No amount of word salad will change this. If you wish to dispute the paper, at least first understand what it means.

 

[Reality Check]

There is no zero carbon emission scenario in the article or paper

No That is not what it suggests. It simply means we have not reached stability at CURRENT levels of CO2 yet.

Wrong. What the article and paper state is that under 2 scenarios of future CO2 emissions plugged into their climate model, we can pass their limit of 1 ℃ by 2100 and thus negative emissions are needed.
There is no zero carbon emission scenario in the article or paper or anything you have cited.

An unsupported "keep warming for hundreds or thousands of years based on CURRENT levels of CO2" assertion.
Give your scientific sources, Red Baron Farms.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Wrong. What the article and paper state is that under 2 scenarios of future CO2 emissions plugged into their climate model, we can pass their limit of 1 ℃ by 2100 and thus negative emissions are needed.
There is no zero carbon emission scenario in the article or paper or anything you have cited.

An unsupported "keep warming for hundreds or thousands of years based on CURRENT levels of CO2" assertion.
Give your scientific sources, Red Baron Farms.

You made the assertion.

The paper and her quote in the article is that if CO2 levels stabilize at current levels then over the next few millennia temperature will rise by roughly 5 degrees C.

Then you contradicted yourself and claimed you didn't say that.
Then you claimed that saying that meant something else.
Now you are claiming what you said and I agreed is both wrong.

It is totally asinine Bull manure. Stop embarrassing yourself.

As I said, until you even understand what you are talking about, there is no need even discuss this. You are outside your field of understanding and arguing no differently than Markie was in the BLP thread, from ignorance and a bit of google/wiki knowledge.

Either that or you are being bullheaded on purpose just to stir up the waters ... even worse.

Either way doesn't matter, it is not worthy of anything but scorn and ridicule.

 

[Reality Check]

You made the assertion. ...insults snipped...

No. I wrote The paper and her quote in the article is that if CO2 levels stabilize at current levels then over the next few millennia temperature will rise by roughly 5 degrees C. This is not a prediction about the effects of reducing CO2 emissions.
But you wrote "If we cut all emissions 100% tomorrow, both fossil fuel and cement, then we still keep warming for hundreds or thousands of years based on CURRENT levels of CO2." That is a prediction about effects of reducing CO2 emissions.

This is not "if CO2 levels stabilize at current levels". You have skipped a step. You have to cite the scientific literature that states:

If we cut all emissions 100% tomorrow, both fossil fuel and cement (your condition)
Then CO2 levels will stabilize at current levels (the paper's condition).​

Thus over the next few millennia temperature will rise by roughly 5 degrees C.

P.S. I think that you are right. But then you keep writing that I am ignorant so my agreement is moot.

 

[lomiller]

No That is not what it suggests. It simply means we have not reached stability at CURRENT levels of CO2 yet. (radiative balance) Much less the addition point based on future emissions. If we cut all emissions 100% tomorrow, both fossil fuel and cement, then we still keep warming for hundreds or thousands of years based on CURRENT levels of CO2.

This simply isn't true. Temperatures lag radiate balance by 1-3 decades, however if we completely stopped emitting CO2 atmospheric CO2 would begin dropping immediately which would mostly offset the radiative imbalance so temperatures would stop going up fairly quickly and then start to drop after a decade or so.

The fly in the ointment is that if we stopped emitting CO2 we would also stop emitting aerosols that have a strong cooling effect, and these would leave the atmosphere much more quickly than CO2 so we'd actually get a very rapid spike in temperatures followed by a gradual decline. If this spike pushed us past a tipping point all bets are off.

Over the very long term CO2 levels would remain somewhat elevated for over 100K years so from a human perspective temperatures would never drop back to "normal".

 

[HansMustermann]

I think we kinda knew a way to store carbon ever since we figured out the Carboniferous, innit? There's a clue in the name right there.

I'd figure, just plant some vast areas with beans for a few years to fix the nitrogen in the soil without spending more carbon to make fertilizers, plant it with fast growing evergreens, cut them down, store the wood somewhere, repeat. And hey, you can eat the beans too.

For some reason though it's not as popular as some spectacularly idiotic plans, like, say, somehow industrially separating the carbon dioxide and pumping it under immense pressure into some cans underground. I guess you don't make political headlines by just proposing to plant some trees. Nor appeal to the kind of demographic for whom "green" is just an excuse for "well, that's too complicated, let's just kill off humans instead" fantasies.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

No. I wrote The paper and her quote in the article is that if CO2 levels stabilize at current levels then over the next few millennia temperature will rise by roughly 5 degrees C. This is not a prediction about the effects of reducing CO2 emissions.
But you wrote "If we cut all emissions 100% tomorrow, both fossil fuel and cement, then we still keep warming for hundreds or thousands of years based on CURRENT levels of CO2." That is a prediction about effects of reducing CO2 emissions.

This is not "if CO2 levels stabilize at current levels". You have skipped a step. You have to cite the scientific literature that states:

If we cut all emissions 100% tomorrow, both fossil fuel and cement (your condition)
Then CO2 levels will stabilize at current levels (the paper's condition).​

Thus over the next few millennia temperature will rise by roughly 5 degrees C.

P.S. I think that you are right. But then you keep writing that I am ignorant so my agreement is moot.

That's simply because you are refusing to accept that there are more ways to stabilize atmospheric levels at roughly current levels.

We could reduce emissions 100%. And all else equal it would stabilize and the papers projection has some evidence to support it. So it is a likely outcome.

Or we could reduce emissions 50% and increase the sequestration rate enough to compensate for the other 50%. That too would stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels, and again the paper shows the likely result. (or any other combination equaling 100%)

But as the paper shows, this really isn't that beneficial. We still have that global warming for a very long time. Thus we need to decrease emissions and increase sequestration so that the two combined exceed 100%.

And now we came full circle back to my original claims. see #10

 

[Red Baron Farms]

I think we kinda knew a way to store carbon ever since we figured out the Carboniferous, innit? There's a clue in the name right there.

I'd figure, just plant some vast areas with beans for a few years to fix the nitrogen in the soil without spending more carbon to make fertilizers, plant it with fast growing evergreens, cut them down, store the wood somewhere, repeat. And hey, you can eat the beans too.

For some reason though it's not as popular as some spectacularly idiotic plans, like, say, somehow industrially separating the carbon dioxide and pumping it under immense pressure into some cans underground. I guess you don't make political headlines by just proposing to plant some trees. Nor appeal to the kind of demographic for whom "green" is just an excuse for "well, that's too complicated, let's just kill off humans instead" fantasies.

The problem with the trees is that they don't sequester carbon efficiently enough. The Grassland biome is far better at that and explains why the vast prairies of the world had produced the deepest blackest rich high carbon soils. Much more than forest soils.

the relation between Mollisols and grassland or steppe has been recognized for more than a century (Shantz 1923). Soils containing a mollic epipedon are among the world’s most productive soils (Liu et al. 2012). The thickness and high soil organic carbon (SOC) contents of the mollic epipedon mean that these soils have sequestered large amounts of C over long periods of time.[1]

This is a major component contributing to our current climates in the first place. At least the carbon component
Cenozoic Expansion of Grasslands and Climatic Cooling

The big advantage being we can restore the grasslands currently being used to raise corn to feed animals and make ethanol additive for gasoline, and actually improve food yields, improve ethanol efficiency, and restore the ecosystem function of soil sequestration of carbon all simultaneously.[2][3][4]

There is actually a tree option that works called silvopasture. This is a combination of trees and pasture mimicking the savanna biomes. The end goal is to have both working together to provide food and shelter for livestock, with additional food and lumber yields from the trees.

However, the primary carbon sequestration in the soil comes from the grasses, especially the C4 grasses.[5][6]

 

[lomiller]

The problem with the trees is that they don't sequester carbon efficiently enough.

Turning forests into grasslands releases large amounts of sequestered CO2. It's caused the release of up to 270Gt of Carbon over the last few thousand years. By comparison ALL current forests, grasslands, croplands, etc combined only contain ~450Gt Carbon.


Erb et al. (2017)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25138

Here we show, using state-of-the-art datasets, that vegetation currently stores around 450 petagrams of carbon. In the hypothetical absence of land use, potential vegetation would store around 916 petagrams of carbon, under current climate conditions. This difference highlights the massive effect of land use on biomass stocks. Deforestation and other land-cover changes are responsible for 53–58% of the difference between current and potential biomass stocks. Land management effects (the biomass stock changes induced by land use within the same land cover) contribute 42–47%,

 

[HansMustermann]

The problem with the trees is that they don't sequester carbon efficiently enough. The Grassland biome is far better at that and explains why the vast prairies of the world had produced the deepest blackest rich high carbon soils. Much more than forest soils.

The idea isn't just how much the forest stores. The idea is that you then cut down the forest, store the wood away, and plant the forest again. So more and more carbon is in a giant pile of dead wood.

You know, same as happened in the carboniferous.