Global Warming: Past the point of no return

[Starwhip]

Little bit disturbing to think about, but we're something like 10,000 years overdue for an Ice Age. And people are flipping out about this 'global warming' when just 50 years ago they thought Detroit was to be covered in a mile of ice. So people are weird.

Anyway, more related: if this was confirmed, we would most definitely get rid of the most carbon-emitting objects on the planet, increase the number of carbon-reducing ones, and crack down on renewable resources. Which we should be doing anyway.

[Klingon Admiral]

Little bit disturbing to think about, but we're something like 10,000 years overdue for an Ice Age. And people are flipping out about this 'global warming' when just 50 years ago they thought Detroit was to be covered in a mile of ice. So people are weird.

The last glacial only ended like 10,000 years ago, while peaking at around 20,000 ya. We are currently well within an interglacial period. The current ice age is going on for the last couple of million years, probably since North and South America merged.

[Aghanim]

It's not really about nature. It'll adapt. Species will be dying out, but in their place, new ones will emerge. Nature has been through worse. Evolution and natural selection will sort them out. We should not be putting "nature" over the Human civilization. However, in that case, we are also threatened. Netherlands would be pretty screwed if the sea level rises, as would some other low and coastal areas.

My answer is simple: go nuclear, then fusion once it's viable. All the anti-nuclear activists are idiots who know nothing about the workings of nuclear reactors. Compared to wind (bird killers), water (fish killers, massive landscape changes), solar (needs too much area and is too inefficient) and geothermal power (only viable in a few places), nuclear is more powerful, cleaner and much cheaper in long run. No renewable energy source can compare.

If you are thinking centralized solar generation, you are really wrong. Solar works in decentralized generation, meaning you plop in solar panels directly where you need the power. Of course, there will be some problems with power storage, but it's probably solvable.

My take on this problem:

Find a desert. A large desert. Get some willingness to kill some desert species. Create a huge array of nuclear powered desalination plant. Create huge network of artificial rivers to wet the desert. Start a small forest. Cut some part of the new forest to create biochar, then use it to fertilize the desert. Repeat until the desert is fully filled with plants

Now, we should reduce the global temperature by 2-3 degrees by now, so the sea could absorb more CO2. Now, we start seeding the sea with iron and fertilizer to enhance algae production, and bring the nutrient rich deep water into the top somehow.

Now read this. This solution will not work alone. This solution need other solutions to work.

[-dead-]

Daft question, really  "how do you return from the Point of No Return"  the clue is in the name: you don't.

And though I wish it weren't, it's also probably the real answer too.

To mitigate the worst of the warming requires more work and sacrifice than anyone is willing to make (and we're probably already out of time), and to return from it will be beyond our by then extremely limited resources  think of how much industrial clout New Orleans had just after Katrina, or Fukushima after the tsunami.

No politicians will ever be willing to implement the policies required to avoid catastrophic global warming because they would never be elected again. So nothing will be done.

What could we do to mitigate warming but won't? Here's a few off the top of my head:

1. Kill at the very minimum, half the world's current population.

2. Abandon any economic system predicated on unlimited, continuous growth -- no capitalism or communism, no consumer economy.

3. Abandon all fossil fuels, bio-fuels and any other fossil-fuel- or agriculture- reliant forms of energy. As it stands, nuclear energy is not a replacement either. Still too much greenhouse gas from the fuel precursors and waste disposal.

4. Ban all private motor transport and all air transport.

5. Heavily penalise through large fares any commuting that involves public transport in favour of moving near enough to the workplace to walk/cycle there. Suburbs will probably become untenable.

6. Give up eating meat altogether, eat only seasonable, local organic vegetables. No artificial fertilizer or pesticides, no mass-produced factory farming as it requires too much transportation.

7. Drastically cut all energy and water use to third world levels  no aircon, no electric light, no dishwasher, no washing machine, no TV, no interwebs, no KSP.

And there's at least 7 reasons why we won't avoid the point of no return and will most likely go extinct. I fantasize about being proved spectacularly wrong, but thus far everything is going depressingly according to plan.

So in the words of Kurt Vonnegut to the graduating class of 1970 at Bennington College  "Everything is going to become unimaginably worse, and never get better again. If I lied to you about that, you would sense that I'd lied to you, and that would be another cause for gloom. We have enough causes for gloom."

or even more succintly:

"Here lies the good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

[Idobox]

The two problems of nuclear are waste and failure. Failure rate is low enough to be the safest production method, waste, although really nasty, is small volumes and ocncentrated, so not much of a problem. Also, fast neutron reactors can turn most of that waste into fuel, solving the problem while providing more energy, a double win. We seriously need to invest big money on fast neutron and breeder reactors, especially the low pressure ones as they are safer.

Seriously reducing our meat consumption would have a huge effect. First of all, much less methane emissions and much less grain to move around. But more importantly, we would have so much food, a significant amount of farmland would be abandoned, turning into forests, which are a great carbon sink.

We have to bulldoze suburbs. They are a huge waste of land, and they have absurd energy requirements. Move as much people to high density dwellings, keeping only farmers and related people in rural areas. With all the reclaimed land around the cities, you can either make farmland and save on transport, or carbon sinks.

Reducing population makes everything simpler, but euthanasia is pretty much the worst way to do it (just after war, starvation and epidemics, which often go together). Birth rates in cities are much lower than in rural areas, which is why experts predict the population will stabilize at some point. To make the process faster, and even decrease global population, the most efficient way is to give incentives to people not to have kids. Educating women and plain bribery (in money, social status or whatever) seem to be the most efficient ways to achieve this. The problem is our economies need to replace workers to keep growth running and paying for investments plus retirements, and shrinking populations are a scarecrow for most economies, so no one will do that unless facing sure and quick doom.

In the end, we will need to get carbon out of the air. Nature will take care of it, but on time scales too long for humans. The easiest way is to turn large amounts of biomass to coal and burying it, essentially reversing what we've been doing for the past 200 years. Turning biomass (for example weeds, wood or seaweeds) into coal "just" requires heat, massive amounts of it. Solar thermal is a good way to address this, but nuclear is also an option. Then you would need to bury it, I propose using the massive holes we've dug out to find coal in the first place.

[lajoswinkler]

point is that is part of earth's formation. a very violent, all be it natural event. you still cant compare that to events caused by climate change through biological/artificial means.

Earth was formed. It was a ball with crust and lots of volcanos, impacted here and there by other bodies. Just like today, only a lot worse. I made a comparison for the sake of showing what natural means.

Hmm, perhaps when this happens, we will have reached the technological level to gain enough energy to strip the Carbon off of the CO2 molecules, and make it into O2, and then destroy the majority of cities (only small towns left, cities were a REALLY bad idea).

Perhaps even return to hunter-gatherer situations, where it took 2000 calories to gain 2000 calories, and thus no "mass-produced" industrial fake food.

Such technological advance would cause so much waste heat it would also pose a problem. I don't know, we're discussing stuff that would require supersomputer clusters to calculate.

No reductions in population (there is still plenty of room for now...... in places like the North American Great Plains and if we terraformed Siberia [somehow..?])

And I would also recommend the construction of O'Neil Cylinders, or large polyhedrons to have self contained biospheres (to at least have some sort of room for expansion and extra food)

The "room" was never an issue. There is plenty of space on Earth, even in the tolerable regions, but people want to live in the city. It's an economical and political problem, too.

Terraforming Siberia would cause an enormous problem. Siberia is basically an ice-locked pile of methane. You don't want to heat Siberia.

As per usual the KSP community never ceases to terrify me...

Mildly autistic pre-teen and teenage population, as always. Don't worry, they're a tiny minority.

Well, if we literally are in a situation, where the alternative to... well mass murder... is that all of mankind dies, but also any chance of life on earth (sofar the only place we know there is life)...

I'd have to say it's the only place I'd be ok with it. Because the alternative action or inaction causes more deaths (all) rather than the action of mass murder saves "some" lives. It is morally acceptable to kill, to save lives. Ie. for a cop to kill someone that is a danger to others (even if it's just 1 other person, which numerically comes out the same, but we'd rather have a cop living than a guy thats a danger to cops). In principle the amount shouldn't matter.

Realistically and for questions of morality, I'd rather spend the ressources making sure that some lives are saved on mars or in a space habitat though.

You'd never get away with such policy. Have you been learning history in school? It would turn into a major global war. Personally, I'd buy a rifle and start eliminating the mass murderers like vermin, because that's what they would be.

If I had the means of dropping a huge bomb on their habitats, I'd do it while they're sleeping. Of course, if it's possible, they should be incarcerated for life, but in a war, when it's basically combat situation "us or them"... It's like SS units in Third Reich Germany. If they're on a train, blow up the train.

Trust me, people would spontaneously gather into defense units and they'd overthrow the government. I don't think you realize the extent of the social damage here.

Nature laughs about the current climate change, it has been through much worse. The earth has already been much hotter than it would be even after the most severe predictions.

No, it does not laugh. It did go through a lot worse, but it was never this fast. This is the fastest change it has ever occured on Earth, with notable exceptions such as the formation of the Moon and other giant body impacts. Even the collosal, global volcanic activity did not occur in such short amount of time.

No one energy source provides all the answers, nuclear has big problems too. It's expensive and we still have no solution for high level wastes. Also, large thermal plants such as nuclear aren't good at demand following. It'll form part of the solution (typically as base load) but it isn't a complete solution on its own.

Also (and people seem to be missing the point a bit here) no type of fuel switching will help if we've passed the point where the warming is caused by human emissions, which is the OPs whole premise.

We don't need a solution for high level waste yet. The amounts are small and are easily kept in storage. It is actually a valuable source of isotopes, not to mention that only a small part of the actual fuel inside is "burned" and can be used again and again.

High level waste is money; several cubic metres of it per decade per 1 GW powerplant.

It not expensive in the long run. It's the most efficient thing we have because it's so plentiful. Granted, we can't rely exclusively on one source, but it should be our basis.

Of course, that would not help if the runaway biosphere heating occurs.

Little bit disturbing to think about, but we're something like 10,000 years overdue for an Ice Age. And people are flipping out about this 'global warming' when just 50 years ago they thought Detroit was to be covered in a mile of ice. So people are weird.

Anyway, more related: if this was confirmed, we would most definitely get rid of the most carbon-emitting objects on the planet, increase the number of carbon-reducing ones, and crack down on renewable resources. Which we should be doing anyway.

No, "people" were not thinking that. It was an idea proposed by few scientists that would be propelled by the money-hungry media.

The notion that we could warm up the biosphere came before 20th century, and it was, and it still is, a mainstream idea. It's only in the last few decades that we started getting actual data that supports that notion.

The fact is that the biosphere is heating up. The fact is that we're the main factors behind it.

Whether it's runaway or not, we don't know.

[78stonewobble]

You'd never get away with such policy. Have you been learning history in school? It would turn into a major global war. Personally, I'd buy a rifle and start eliminating the mass murderers like vermin, because that's what they would be.

If I had the means of dropping a huge bomb on their habitats, I'd do it while they're sleeping. Of course, if it's possible, they should be incarcerated for life, but in a war, when it's basically combat situation "us or them"... It's like SS units in Third Reich Germany. If they're on a train, blow up the train.

Trust me, people would spontaneously gather into defense units and they'd overthrow the government. I don't think you realize the extent of the social damage here.

Yes, I did have history in school. You missed the point of my post... and the irony of your own though. Which boiled down to commit mass murder to prevent mass murder and killing so one self can survive.

In any case, my point was that, in such an extreme situation. A situation where we have to kill ie. 95 % of the people and the only other alternative, through action or inaction, is to kill 100 % of people. Then the choice that kills the fewest people, or conversely saves the most lives (depending on whether you're a glass half full or half empty kinda guy), is the morally correct one.

If the result is as you describe the scenario, then it wont matter who started and who ended, the problem might fix itself anyway and very few will hold any moral highground, when it's all over.

[iDan122]

To answer the first question, it's already happened. To answer the second, in order to reduce climate change to pre-industrial levels, we'll probably have to do some pretty drastic stuff. Needless to say, it won't be pretty, and it may very well entail a period of significant economic and technological stagnation in exchange for survival.

- Complete conversion to sustainable power sources

- Extensive, UN-imposed restrictions on industrial and household carbon emissions

- Global one-child or no-child policies

- Euthanasia of a large portion of humanity to lower population to sustainable levels

- Massive geoengineering by the means of geological carbon-trapping

- Dispersing reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere

- Deployment of space-based mirrors to redirect sunlight

- Re-tooling economies to free population from excess consumption

- Genetic modification of crops, trees, algae in order to increase carbon absorbtion

Best solution to world problems. The second I am able to do all that, I will.

[78stonewobble]

It's part of the solution, but no one technology is THE solution. A good grid should have a mix of power sources anyway. Renewables can be intermittant like wind and solar, or very predictable like tidal. Large hydro can even store power from other renewables that are generating at the wrong time.

Indeed, heat a massive problem. As is transport. People get all excited about electricity, but unless you see us moving to an all-electric system soon then it's only part of the picture.

However, the topic of this thread isn't really about what energy systems we need to avoid runaway climate change, it's about what we'd do if we hadn't managed to avoid it. Reducing CO₂ emissions at that point wouldn't actually address the problem.

Had it been up to me, we would have gone nuclear a long time ago. I'd prefer some "local" "garbage" problems, rather than being part of killing 125 mio. people plus... -..-

Sure, the supply isn't endless, but there would have been alot less rush to go with alternate energy supplies.

...

In any case... If we need to modify the environment large scale and relatively quickly I think spacebased solar shades is the best way to go.

Combined with widespred rationing of ressource usage offcourse.

[78stonewobble]

A much more viable alternative would be a worldwide effort to quickly build mass renewable power generators over massive areas of the surface to cut carbon emissions. Also mandatory switching to electric cars and construction of millions of scrubbing towers to absorb the CO2. Also replace cattle farming with grain production which takes much less energy for the same amount of food while eliminating one of the largest sources of greenhouse gasses.

It would be a worldwide effort and not particarly nice but it sure would be better than the mass murder of billions. Once the situation had stabilised again money could start being put into developing a future hydrogen economy which could raise the quality of life but retain the ability to be environmentally friendly.

Well I'm not suggesting mass murder just for the sake of suggesting it... *lol* I literally meant that, if the only alternative to mass murder is an even bigger murder.

If there's another alternative... offcourse I'd go with that.

PS: I'm not worried... I think "highly" of humanity. We're like the ape version of rats and roaches... Some of us are gonna make it somehow.

Edited April 14, 2014 by 78stonewobble

[TheCardinal]

Imagine a scenario where, in the future, Global Warming has been confirmed to be past the Point of No Return. Where it has been proven that should the Earth be left to its natural devices with no human intervention, the average temperature would keep going higher until it reaches unhabitable temperatures.

In such a future, what would humanity have to do in order to return from the Point of No Return? What man-made solutions would be needed to change the average global temperature back to a sustainable level?

Unless i have an incorrect understanding of the english language the answer to your question should be "Nothing!".

After the point of no return has been passed there is no return possible no matter what any does or doesnt do.

[lajoswinkler]

Nature would take care of us by famine and diseases. No need for genocide. And I was serious about the vermin. If I saw people murdering on the behalf of the government, I'd destroy them.

[Red Iron Crown]

Nature would take care of us by famine and diseases. No need for genocide. And I was serious about the vermin. If I saw people murdering on the behalf of the government, I'd destroy them.

Do you go after every military person? Because that's basically their job description.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Fun Fact: Euthanasia and Genocide are two very different things.... Killing most of humanity falls very firmly under the latter.

[SargeRho]

We don't need to reduce the population. Build irrigation systems and solar power stations in the Sahara, and as the climate continues to warm, areas like Siberia and parts of Canada will become more arable.

But we need to swtich to renewable energy sources, and if possible capture the CO2 from powerplants and factories and turn it into graphene or so, killing two flies with one stone. And let's build Helium 3 gas mines in Saturn while we're at it, in the future.

[Nuke]

Nature would take care of us by famine and diseases. No need for genocide. And I was serious about the vermin. If I saw people murdering on the behalf of the government, I'd destroy them.

in an environment of increasingly harsh conditions and dwindling resources, war is inevitable. genocide often comes with war. at this point its join up with the state or become its enemy. last place you want to be is on the conveyor belt in the murder mill.

[Rondon]

What I don't get about the Genocide scenario especially with relation to this question, is the fact that you're killing off half the industrial base that you're supposed to be using to undo the problem, not only that but by killing off half the world you also cripple the ability to specialize production. Making it far harder to progress. its simply easier to just use all that political power and co-ordination that you were going to use to commit the greatest atrocity in human history and just co-ordinate a switch to sustainability, and then move onto the problem at hand.

[78stonewobble]

Fun Fact: Euthanasia and Genocide are two very different things.... Killing most of humanity falls very firmly under the latter.

Irrelevant...

If there is only 2 choices of action / inaction:

A: Leads to 95 percent of everyone dead.

B: Leads to 100 percent of everyone dead.

Then A is the morally correct one. No matter how many you'll be killing... Because it's morally acceptable to kill to save lives and thats what you're doing in A. B... Is just killing.

Oh sorry for this off topic'ness it's just an interesting moral dilemma imho, if farfetched as hell.

Edited April 14, 2014 by 78stonewobble

[Skyler4856]

Why ever would you put in in LEO? They would have to be enormous there. Build them at the Earth-Sun L1 point. No drag to contend with either. Wouldn't be cheap, but it is essentially doable with our current level of technology.

The established long term trend since the 70's has been declining world average rates of population growth. Birthrates have fallen around most of the world due to increases in education, increased standards of living and longevity, and improving access to healthcare. Human populations are growing, but by lower and lower rates each year. The U.N. projects a worse case scenario of the world population peaking in the 2050's at around 10 billion people, and declining gradually afterwards as the world average growth rate becomes negative (as it already is in most of the developed world). Other estimates suggest the peak will come sooner at 8-9 billion. The current world population is over 7.2 billion. The Malthusian problem has been avoided for decades because of huge improvements in agricultural productivity. This trend doesn't seem to be changing, though water resources will likely grow more scarce in the relatively near future. In the historical context war, disease and pestilence seem to be at record lows as well. So much for the horsemen.

Fossil fuels, and biodiversity loss are the big problem for humanity right now. Part of the solution seems pretty straightforward: switch to renewables and nuclear. Land use habits may be more difficult to change.... Also, we might still need the sunshade to deal with the damage already done. But no death camps are necessary. Seriously, it depresses me to hear this typically anarcho-primitivist type fire and brimstone (unfortunately not uncommon among some of my fellow environmentalists). It reminds me of the people who pray for the apocalypse and they day when they can be raptured up to heaven and watch the unrighteous burn on Earth.

I meant drag from radiation pressure, and micrometeorites would still be an issue,

[NERVAfan]

And there's at least 7 reasons why we won't avoid the point of no return and will most likely go extinct.

Nope. Global warming is a very real problem, but it isn't a "kill the species" problem. We will not end up in a Venus type environment; I severely doubt there's even enough fossil fuels on Earth for that.

We might well end up in a setup like the Eocene or parts of the Mesozoic with no permanent ice cover anywhere and tropical-type species up through most of the temperate zones (several thousand years down the road, melting East Antarctica would take a lot of time, and those periods had really high CO2 levels, like 1000-2000 ppm range)... but while changing to that setup so quickly (in geological terms) would kill off a lot of species and cause massive disruptions, it's not a biosphere killer.

Even with our other environmental problems... even if we end up in a severely impoverished biosphere dominated by opportunistic species and lose most of the unique and beautiful, irreplaceable biodiversity of Earth .... it's not going to kill off the human species. Plants will still make food and make O2/remove CO2, animals will still be around, soil biota will still recycle nutrients... humanity will survive. We're not talking something on the scale of the K-T mass extinction (and honestly I'd give humans decent odds of surviving even that... we're a lot smarter than dinosaurs and have very adaptable food requirements).

Edited April 15, 2014 by NERVAfan
"remove CO2" not make CO2

[NERVAfan]

No one energy source provides all the answers, nuclear has big problems too. It's expensive and we still have no solution for high level wastes.

Sure we do. Bury them in a desolate place far from any groundwater used by humans (say, Yucca Mountain). Volumes of high-level waste are IIUC small, and there are huge desolate deserts. Nuclear stuff is not actually that bad for the ecosystem except in very high intensities; what you'd get on top of a buried site isn't even close to that.

(Even Chernobyl is mostly OK ecologically... yes, there are some differences in the soil fungi and so on, but mostly OK... the thing is, human health limits are set based on individual health, in ecosystem/conservation terms we are talking about the health of the population which is much more forgiving especially as e.g. cancer tends to hit individuals of post-reproductive age).

[Seret]

While I do agree that the science behiend the scrubbing towers needs to be explained, a pessimistic attitude is not helping the conversation in anyway.

It actually wasn't pessimism, it was an attempt to stimulate some actual detailed discussion of the technologies. Carbon capture is a technology in it's infancy, and is worth discussing.

Sure we do. Bury them in a desolate place far from any groundwater used by humans

That would be a solution, but the reality is that AFAIK there's only one geological sequestration site for high level waste operating in the entire world, and it only takes Finland's own waste. Everybody else's high level waste is just chucked in cooling ponds and forgotten about. Long-term disposal sites are theoretically pretty straightforward, but have proven somewhat troublesome to actually build.

[Aghanim]

Unless i have an incorrect understanding of the english language the answer to your question should be "Nothing!".

After the point of no return has been passed there is no return possible no matter what any does or doesnt do.

I think the question need to be rewritten. There isn't any point of no return in global warming, there is a point where global warming enters positive feedback

[magnemoe]

Nope. Global warming is a very real problem, but it isn't a "kill the species" problem. We will not end up in a Venus type environment; I severely doubt there's even enough fossil fuels on Earth for that.

We might well end up in a setup like the Eocene or parts of the Mesozoic with no permanent ice cover anywhere and tropical-type species up through most of the temperate zones (several thousand years down the road, melting East Antarctica would take a lot of time, and those periods had really high CO2 levels, like 1000-2000 ppm range)... but while changing to that setup so quickly (in geological terms) would kill off a lot of species and cause massive disruptions, it's not a biosphere killer.

Even with our other environmental problems... even if we end up in a severely impoverished biosphere dominated by opportunistic species and lose most of the unique and beautiful, irreplaceable biodiversity of Earth .... it's not going to kill off the human species. Plants will still make food and make O2/remove CO2, animals will still be around, soil biota will still recycle nutrients... humanity will survive. We're not talking something on the scale of the K-T mass extinction (and honestly I'd give humans decent odds of surviving even that... we're a lot smarter than dinosaurs and have very adaptable food requirements).

This, thanks for pointing out the worst case scenario who is not pleasant as you say and will have massive impact, the following wars will however kill more people.

And yes some humans will survive an K-T event.

[Guest]

How would geopolitics adjust to that would be another matter entirely. Almost the entire humanity could survive such an event, and probably would, given perfect cooperation. In fact, I'd love to have balmy tropical weather through Europe. Of course, if the leaders screwed this up, there could be a lot of victims.