Will our war against climate change be won or lost in our oceans?

[durangodawood]

And just like Battlefield Earth, it'll fire up just like that!

Cultural reference lost on me darn it.

 

[eclipsenow]

Cultural reference lost on me darn it.

It was a fun book about human beings fighting back against sadistic big-cat aliens that ruled the earth. But it's a bit cliche, and didn't earn L Ron Hubbard enough money.
He joked at a Sci-Fi convention that he could probably earn far more money if he invented a religion.
And so Scientology was born.

 

[Tinker Grey]

Cultural reference lost on me darn it.

It was a fun book about human beings fighting back against sadistic big-cat aliens that ruled the earth. But it's a bit cliche, and didn't earn L Ron Hubbard enough money.
He joked at a Sci-Fi convention that he could probably earn far more money if he invented a religion.
And so Scientology was born.

I don't know how the book went, but the story is that Earth has been dominated for many(?) 1000s of years. Well, our heroes find US fighter jets and just start them up and fly them. OY! Bad.

 

[durangodawood]

I don't know how the book went, but the story is that Earth has been dominated for many(?) 1000s of years. Well, our heroes find US fighter jets and just start them up and fly them. OY! Bad.

Another day in the life of an operating thetan.

 

[smittymatt]

Gee thanks!

Oops - kinda wrecked that one!


That's like someone trying to tell Winston Churchill not to do anything about Hitler because "Don't worry - market forces will do something if they have to!"

Sometimes there really are emergencies that the government must take responsibility for.
Like, just imagine there was this big comet heading for Earth...
(Some language warnings apply...)

Yeah - because Joseph Fourier discovered something in our atmospheric gases trapped heat on earth in the 1820's and kept that fact secret until Karl Marx could come along decades later and write his manifesto.... Oh yeah, and Eunice Foote chipped in with Karl Marx as well when she isolated CO2 out as the primary warming gas. It's not like every decent physics lab on the ENTIRE planet can test and confirm the basic physics of this thing!?

I mean, there are left wing and right wing people at work in the climate community. People who can understand not every intrusion into the precious 'holy of holies' - the marketplace - is a bad thing. People who can comprehend that sometimes bad stuff needs to be banned, like CFC's that ate the ozone layer or smoking in certain venues and other bad environmental impacts. Because it's just right. Let alone the fact that fossil fuels kill about 3.5 million people globally through air pollution and lung disease - and are finite and actually will run out one day. But before that they will peak in supply and then never again meet demand, rising in cost and bankrupting the world economy. But hey - imagine if we left fossil fuels first before they leave us? Imagine we tried to invent clean energy that didn't pollute our cities and kill our citizens and actually cause the climate change that NO SINGLE National Academy of Science on the PLANET denies?



What - you were going to show how this next video just isn't true? The thermal camera could see the candle flame somehow - they got this wrong? One minute in - physics at work

Can you promise me one thing? If the earth starts cooling and it looks like we are headed for another ice age, we can quickly pump a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere to restart the greenhouse effect? I think it would be best if we could try to control it either way- up or down.

 

[TedT]

but the next front where climate change could be won or lost is in our oceans.

It will not be won...this earth is doomed, sooner or later and all the signs of its demise are in play at this time.

 

[SkyWriting]

AUIU, there is, unfortunately, plenty of coal left...

And natural gas.

 

[SkyWriting]

It will not be won...this earth is doomed, sooner or later and all the signs of its demise are in play at this time.

As are the documented solutions that have played out eliminating past dire predictions.

 

[eclipsenow]

Can you promise me one thing? If the earth starts cooling and it looks like we are headed for another ice age, we can quickly pump a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere to restart the greenhouse effect? I think it would be best if we could try to control it either way- up or down.

If we can get through the next hundred years or so then we won't use fossil fuels to warm the Earth and stop an ice age. We would have a space industry by then that would cheaply and easily manufacturer big mirrors in space and just direct them at the few kilometres a year that wants to stay frozen at the end of winter which is how a Milankovitch cycle starts a glacial period

 

[AV1611VET]

If we can get through the next hundred years or so then we won't use fossil fuels to warm the Earth and stop an ice age. We would have a space industry by then that would cheaply and easily manufacturer big mirrors in space and just direct them at the few kilometres a year that wants to stay frozen at the end of winter which is how a Milankovitch cycle starts a glacial period

Until the Leonid meteor shower puts an end to all those dreams.

 

[eclipsenow]

Until the Leonid meteor shower puts an end to all those dreams.

Hmmm, no. The ISS has survived many Leonid showers and even storms. It's about knowing where and how to place the various satellites.
Space StationMeteor Shower | Science Mission Directorate
Indeed, one of the main reasons we might marry the quest for clean energy and space is solar-farms in space that microwave the energy down to big rectennae. They're called PowerSats, and if we ever get a manufacturing base on the moon could be cheaply rail-gunned into orbit around the Earth from the moon. (The moon has 1/6g, so the physicists tell me that's 1/24th the energy required to launch.)
Then you have some of the $10 TRILLION DOLLAR A YEAR energy budget going into space! What an awesome world that would be.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Hmmm, no. The ISS has survived many Leonid showers and even storms. It's about knowing where and how to place the various satellites.
Space StationMeteor Shower | Science Mission Directorate
Indeed, one of the main reasons we might marry the quest for clean energy and space is solar-farms in space that microwave the energy down to big rectennae. They're called PowerSats, and if we ever get a manufacturing base on the moon could be cheaply rail-gunned into orbit around the Earth from the moon. (The moon has 1/6g, so the physicists tell me that's 1/24th the energy required to launch.)
Then you have some of the $10 TRILLION DOLLAR A YEAR energy budget going into space! What an awesome world that would be.

Just to add on a bit any mirror in space is highly unlikely to be made of glass. A mirror that would reflect sunlight would likely be made of a thin flexible substance such as mylar coated with aluminum. The worst meteor shower might make a couple of small holes in it that would not affect its ability to reflect light at all.

 

[Gottservant]

The bible says the waters will be poisoned...

...sadly a big part of that, looks like it will be us!

 

[eclipsenow]

Hey guys? You know how I was just arguing that sea level rise projections were not wrong because the original IPCC report pretty much projected 1m by 2100?

New science says maybe they were wrong - after all.

Thaites might be gone in 5 years!
(Maybe less.)

Then 750 million people would have to move.

 

[Ophiolite]

It was a fun book about human beings fighting back against sadistic big-cat aliens that ruled the earth. But it's a bit cliche, and didn't earn L Ron Hubbard enough money.
He joked at a Sci-Fi convention that he could probably earn far more money if he invented a religion.
And so Scientology was born.

You have your events out of sequence. Scientology was introduced by Hubbard (early 1950s) long before he wrote Battlefield Earth (1982). Hubbard is my favourite anti-hero - he told people he was going to con them, then he conned them and they loved it. Brilliant!

 

[grasping the after wind]

I'm now convinced that a major new front is opening up in our war against climate change. Dirty energy is one front, but the next front where climate change could be won or lost is in our oceans. We started to make climate change worse when we started industrial scale whaling and fishing. The whale population today is 1% of what it was. It's a similar story with the larger fish. Why does this matter? Water turnover. Larger sea life swam up and down through the water column, dragging nutrients with them. The lack of those nutrients today is killing the world's kelp forests - they're effectively starving to death. Whales used to poo huge volumes of nutrients out at the top of the water column - fertilising the ocean there. This and their movement stimulated the ocean food chain, increasing CO2 uptake. Those natural mechanisms are almost dead. Add to this the fact that climate change warms the surface waters so much that the thermocline (warmer waters) are now deeper, making it harder for the same wind to turnover the water column and bring up nutrients. Ocean nutrients are trapped too deep. Worldwide we see that the kelp forests are simply starving to death. It's SO serious I'm convinced that clean energy is one front - and ocean management and restoration is a second major front in the climate wars. But there is hope on the way! This 8 minute summary from the BBC covers revolutions in Australian kelp farming and what we have learned.

To go deeper, watch the presentation that starts with Dr Brian Von Herzen from Cambridge University which starts at 28 minutes in: it's keyframed to the right spot. The threats from an overheated ocean with fixed water layers are almost incomprehensible - but the potential to fix this problem and benefit from it are also exponential. The problem is the solution - if the water layers are fixed - let's mix them up! The answer is floating deep sea platforms to grow kelp. Floating solar farms pump up the nutrient rich water from hundreds of meters below, growing kelp which will give us animal feed, fertiliser, food, medicine, plastics, artificial skin for medicine, and ultimately fund GIGATONS of carbon sequestration. And they're on the way! Let's demand our super funds invest in these rigs to both save the climate and our super.

I am a pacifist, so I am not at war with the climate or its changes. Your war against climate change is unwinnable. The climate is too powerful and beyond your ability to defeat. The climate will change no matter what strategy you employ or weapons you bring to bear against it. I will continue to honor my personal non-aggression pact with the climate and remain at peace with it. I will conform to the terms of that pact by using that which is within my power to adapt to the climate's changes rather than arrogantly attempting to control it.

 

[Ophiolite]

I will conform to the terms of that pact by using that which is within my power to adapt to the climate's changes rather than arrogantly attempting to control it.

So, no room there for for you to change your behaviour that is causing the climate changes? That would just be too inconvenient for you would it? Or, are you already 100% green and supportive of persuading others?

 

[grasping the after wind]

So, no room there for for you to change your behaviour that is causing the climate changes? That would just be too inconvenient for you would it? Or, are you already 100% green and supportive of persuading others?

If my behavior was causing climate change, I would be amazed. If the climate was angry that I was causing it to change, I would apologize profusely and changec whatever behavior I was engaged in that angered it. If on the other hand, the climate was pleased that I was helping it to change I would certainly be amenable to continuing to help it out. So, I am certainly not worried about being inconvenienced. I simply haven't been approached by the climate on the matter and I seriously doubt the climate has noticed me at all.

 

[eclipsenow]

If my behavior was causing climate change, I would be amazed. If the climate was angry that I was causing it to change, I would apologize profusely and changec whatever behavior I was engaged in that angered it. If on the other hand, the climate was pleased that I was helping it to change I would certainly be amenable to continuing to help it out. So, I am certainly not worried about being inconvenienced. I simply haven't been approached by the climate on the matter and I seriously doubt the climate has noticed me at all.

This comment just shows what we already could guess.

Climate science has been proved repeatedly. But it doesn't sit well with your politics. So you sit back and make fatuous comments about it. Oh well. If you want to have a grown up conversation about this, I'm all ears. Until then...

 

[grasping the after wind]

This comment just shows what we already could guess.

Climate science has been proved repeatedly. But it doesn't sit well with your politics. So you sit back and make fatuous comments about it. Oh well. If you want to have a grown up conversation about this, I'm all ears. Until then...

Climate science is not something that needs to be proven and it certainly does not have to be repeatedly proved(sic) because no one in their right mind would assert that there is no such thing as climate science. We all accept that the science of studying the climate exists and that it has been successful in proving number of things about climate and been unable to prove a number of other things. I doubt anyone has wasted their time repeatedly proving it exists.