Livestock makes up 27% of human-caused methane release which is a huge chunk proportional to the other factors.
Millions of buffalo didn't crash mother nature. If these buffoons want to do something about methane then they should do it instead of devising corporate scams. I appreciate that you believe it and support it but I don't. That doesn't make either of us a bad person, just a difference in opinion.
I agree with you that the dairy monopolies should be shuttered and managed by smaller local independent operations tied to the needs and benefits of the locals. Everybody would benefit.
I don't think either of us believe in the "corporate scam" but it seems like you doubt the very basis of the science in question regarding methane. It is a greenhouse gas with 100x the warming potential of CO2 over a 5-year period and 72x the warming potential of CO2 over a 20-year period.
Millions of wild buffalo didn't crash mother nature.
There are about 1.5 billion cattle in the world today.
I really hate to tell you this, but raising livestock to feed 7.4 billion people is very taxing on the global environment. It takes about 441 gallons of water to produce one pound of boneless beef. In comparison to other protein-rich foods, beef is at the top of the scale, having a larger environmental impact than chicken, milk, eggs, chickpeas, lentils, and peas.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
I really hate to tell you this, but raising livestock to feed 7.4 billion people is very taxing on the global environment. It takes about 441 gallons of water to produce one pound of boneless beef. In comparison to other protein-rich foods, beef is at the top of the scale, having a larger environmental impact than chicken, milk, eggs, chickpeas, lentils, and peas.
Probably combined.
Not to mention the destruction of forests (carbon sinks) in order to create grazing for cattle.
I do love a good bone in Ribeye though.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
I don't think either of us believe in the "corporate scam" but it seems like you doubt the very basis of the science in question regarding methane.
The corporate scam is real in my mind. I am more pointing toward the methods and motives used in the process which seem to be heavy on penalties for the little guy and rich in dollars for the elite. Al Gore is a good example and by far not the only one and this dairy proposal will prove itself to be another one over the next few decades in my opinion. Cows will continue to fart as big dairy gets larger and increases the size of its herds to meet demand, beef prices will rise. I expect this to be the only outcome even though "science" will chart improvements as the small dairy operator is phased out.
It takes about 441 gallons of water to produce one pound of boneless beef.
Most farmers I know water their cows from with the surface runoff from streams and ponds with big dairy often being the exception. I have seen more farming operations than I can count with the overwhelming majority not using city or county water hookups.
"A mind stretched by a new idea can never return to it's original dimensions." Oliver Wendell Holmes
Well then small organic anarchist farmers need to defenestrate the corporate guys. I'm on board with that. It also seems to me that we need to slow cattle breeding at the same time to get that 1.5 billion number down. There's no other way around that.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
Though it may not have seemed possible, climate catastrophe is even closer than previously thought, with new figures released Thursday finding that—when the wells already drilled, pits dug, and pipelines built, are taken under consideration—we are well on our way to going beyond 2°C of warming.
"If you're in a hole, stop digging," begins the study, put forth by the fossil fuel watchdog Oil Change International (OCI), in partnership with 14 other environmental organizations.
The report, The Sky's Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production (pdf), calculates the potential carbon emissions for already developed reserves and transportation projects, such as oil wells, tar pits, pipelines, processing facilities, railways, and exports terminals.
The findings are bleak: "The potential carbon emissions from the oil, gas, and coal in the world's currently operating fields and mines would take us beyond 2°C of warming," the study confirms. "The reserves in currently operating oil and gas fields alone, even with no coal, would take the world beyond 1.5°C."
"In other words," campaigner Bill McKibben wrote at the The New Republic on Thursday, "if our goal is to keep the Earth's temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do? Here's the answer: zero."
Similarly, the researchers state unequivocally, "No new fossil fuel extraction or transportation infrastructure should be built, and governments should grant no new permits for them."
As the researchers note, the stark new figures "scientifically groun[d] the growing movement to keep carbon in the ground." The report comes at the same time that environmentalists and Indigenous activists, in North Dakota and elsewhere, are literally risking their bodies to fight oil pipeline expansion, while campaigners across the U.S. dog the federal government for continuing to lease public lands for oil and gas drilling.
The time for "expanding the fossil fuel frontier" is over, McKibben states.
The author and co-founder of 350.org compares OCI's findings to his seminal 2012 essay on the "terrifying math" of climate change, which argued that untapped fossil fuel reserves contained five times more carbon than feasible to burn to stay beneath the 2°C threshold, and concludes that "the new new math is even more explosive."
OCI reportedly paid a hefty $54,000 for industry data from Rystad Energy, a leading oil and gas consultancy, and compares it against carbon budgets derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In addition to OCI, the report was produced in collaboration with 350.org as well as Amazon Watch, the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), Bold Alliance, Christian Aid, Earthworks, Équiterre, Global Catholic Climate Movement, the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Indigenous Environmental Network, IndyAct, Rainforest Action Network, and Stand.earth.
Report author Greg Muttitt explained that while previous studies only focused on the burning of fossil fuels, this analysis also factored in what carbon budgets and existing extraction operations mean for the supply of those energy sources. "Once an extraction operation is underway, it creates an incentive to continue so as to recoup investment and create profit, ensuring the product—the fossil fuels—are extracted and burned. These incentives are powerful, and the industry will do whatever it takes to protect their investments and keep drilling," he said. "This is how carbon gets 'locked-in.'"
In short, even if a government says it wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels, as long as it keeps approving new infrastructure, carbon will be emitted.
Or as McKibben put it, "It's not that if we keep eating like this for a few more decades we'll be morbidly obese. It's that if we eat what's already in the refrigerator we'll be morbidly obese."
McKibben goes on to calculate some of this "new new" math:
In the United States alone, the existing mines and oil wells and gas fields contain 86 billion tons of carbon emissions—enough to take us 25 percent of the way to a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature. But if the U.S. energy industry gets its way and develops all the oil wells and fracking sites that are currently planned, that would add another 51 billion tons in carbon emissions. And if we let that happen, America would single-handedly blow almost 40 percent of the world's carbon budget.
"If the world is serious about achieving the goals agreed in Paris, governments have to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry," said OCI executive director Stephen Kretzmann. "The industry has enough carbon in the pipeline—today—to break through the sky's limit."
In addition to halting all new infrastructure projects, the report also recommends that "some fields and mines—primarily in rich countries—should be closed before fully exploiting their resources, and financial support should be provided for non-carbon development in poorer countries."
"This does not mean stopping using all fossil fuels overnight," the researchers continue. "Governments and companies should conduct a managed decline of the fossil fuel industry and ensure a just transition for the workers and communities that depend on it."
Given OCI's assessment that, "If you let current fields begin their natural decline, you'll be using 50 percent less oil by 2033," McKibben estimates that the world has 17 years to replace current fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy.
"That's enough time—maybe—to replace gas guzzlers with electric cars. To retrain pipeline workers and coal miners to build solar panels and wind turbines."
"This is literally a math test," he concludes, "and it's not being graded on a curve. It only has one correct answer. And if we don't get it right, then all of us—along with our 10,000-year-old experiment in human civilization—will fail."
We have to solve flight, transoceanic shipping, and heavy industry. The last bolded section is a little disingenuous, because individual automobiles are a blip compared to jet fuel and low-grade bunker diesel in container ships.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
Personally I think she's underestimating. Not in terms of severity but time. I think it will happen a lot sooner than several thousand years, especially if you take permafrost melt into account.
New research predicts rise of up to 9° Celsius within next several thousand years—surpassing most other predictions by Nika Knight, staff writer
"This is not an exact prediction or a forecast," the author of the new research said, advising caution regarding her study's temperature predictions. "The experiment we as humans are doing is very different than what we saw in the past." (Photo: Massmo Relsig/flickr/cc)
Earth is the warmest it's been in 100,000 years, a new reconstruction of historical temperature data finds, and with today's level of fossil fuel emissions the planet is "locked into" eventually hitting its highest temperature mark in 2 million years.
The new research published Monday in Nature was done by Carolyn Snyder, now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as a part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, according to the Associated Press.
Snyder "created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. [Snyder's reconstruction] doesn't estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years," AP writes.
"We do find this close relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases that is remarkably stable, and what the study is developing is the coupling factor between the two," Snyder told National Geographic.
AP further reports:
Temperatures averaged out over the most recent 5,000 years—which includes the last 125 years or so of industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases—are generally warmer than they have been since about 120,000 years ago or so, Snyder found. And two interglacial time periods, the one 120,000 years ago and another just about 2 million years ago, were the warmest Snyder tracked. They were about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the current 5,000-year average.
With the link to carbon dioxide levels and taking into account other factors and past trends, Snyder calculated how much warming can be expected in the future.
"Snyder said if climate factors are the same as in the past—and that's a big if," AP notes, "Earth is already committed to another 7 degrees or so (about 4 degrees Celsius) of warming over the next few thousand years."
Nature described Snyder's findings in greater detail in an article accompanying her published study: "Even if the amount of atmospheric CO2 were to stabilize at current levels, the study suggests that average temperatures may increase by roughly 5° C over the next few millennia as a result of the effects of the greenhouse gas on glaciers, ecosystems and other factors. A doubling of the pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 of roughly 280 parts per million, which could occur within decades unless people curb greenhouse-gas emissions, could eventually boost global average temperatures by around 9° C."
"This is not an exact prediction or a forecast," Snyder told Nature, advising caution regarding her study's temperature predictions. "The experiment we as humans are doing is very different than what we saw in the past."
There has been some controversy in the scientific community following publication of Snyder's research: several climate scientists told National Geographic that they felt Snyder's estimate of future temperature rise, far higher than many previous estimates, was an outlier, signalling that her methods were faulty.
Michael Mann, an influential climate researcher at Penn State University who was not involved in Snyder's research, told Mashable that "I regard the study as provocative and interesting, but the quantitative findings must be viewed rather skeptically until the analysis has been thoroughly vetted by the scientific community."
Other scientists said they were intrigued by Snyder's findings and hope her study leads to additional research. Jeremy Shakun, a climate researcher at Boston College, told AP that "Snyder's work is a great contribution and future work should build on it."
"It's a useful starting place," Snyder said to Nature about her research. "People can take this and improve upon it as more records become available in the future."
Intelligence may turn out to have a negative survival value, not because it's not useful, but because culture protects disastrous behaviour from natural selection.
Last edited by Harvey on Tue Sep 27, 2016 8:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me "The greatest thing You'll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return"
One of the morbidly fascinating aspects of climate change is how much cognitive dissonance it generates, in individuals and nations alike.
The more you understand the brutal logic of climate change — what it could mean, the effort necessary to forestall it — the more the intensity of the situation seems out of whack with the workaday routines of day-to-day life. It’s a species-level emergency, but almost no one is acting like it is. And it’s very, very difficult to be the only one acting like there’s an emergency, especially when the emergency is abstract and science-derived, grasped primarily by the intellect.
This psychological schism is true for individuals, and it’s true for nations. Take the Paris climate agreement.
In Paris, in 2015, the countries of the world agreed (again) on the moral imperative to hold the rise in global average temperature to under 2 degrees Celsius, and to pursue "efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees." To date, 62 countries, including the United States, China, and India, have ratified the agreement.
Are any of the countries that signed the Paris agreement taking the actions necessary to achieve that target?
No. The US is not. Nor is the world as a whole.
The actions necessary to hold to 2 degrees, much less 1.5 degrees, are simply outside the bounds of conventional politics in most countries. Anyone who proposed them would sound crazy, like they were proposing, I don’t know, a war or something.
So we say 2 degrees is unacceptable. But we don’t act like it is.
This cognitive dissonance is brought home yet again in a new report from Oil Change International (in collaboration with a bunch of green groups). It’s about fossil fuels and how much of them we can afford to dig up and burn, if we’re serious about what we said in Paris. It’s mostly simple math, but the implications are vast and unsettling.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Staying beneath 2 degrees means immediately and rapidly declining emissions Scientists have long agreed that warming higher than 2 degrees will result in widespread food, water, weather, and sea level stresses, with concomitant immigration, conflict, and suffering, inequitably distributed.
But 2 degrees is not some magic threshold where tolerable becomes dangerous. A two-year review of the latest science by the UNFCCC found that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees means heat extremes, water shortages, and falling crop yields. "The ‘guardrail’ concept, in which up to 2°C of warming is considered safe," the review concluded, "is inadequate."
The report recommends that 2 degrees be seen instead as "an upper limit, a defense line that needs to be stringently defended, while less warming would be preferable."
This changing understanding of 2 degrees matters, because the temperature target we choose, and the probability with which we aim to hit it, establishes our "carbon budget," i.e., the amount of CO2 we can still emit before blowing it.
Many commonly used scenarios (including the International Energy Agency’s) are built around a 50 percent chance of hitting 2 degrees. But if 2 degrees is an "upper limit" and "less warming would be preferable," it seems we would want a higher than 50-50 chance of stopping short of it.
So the authors of the Oil Change report choose two scenarios to model. One gives us a 66 percent chance of stopping short of 2 degrees. The other gives us a 50 percent chance of stopping short of 1.5 degrees. Here’s what they look like:
This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere. There are several ways to sequester greenhouse gases, from reforestation to soil enrichment to cow backpacks, but the backbone of the envisioned negative emissions is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
BECCS — raising, harvesting, and burning biomass for energy, while capturing and burying the carbon emissions — is unproven at scale. Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
"If we want to avoid depending on unproven technology becoming available," the authors say, "emissions would need to be reduced even more rapidly."
You could say that. This is from climate researcher Glen Peters, based on a scenario with a 66 percent chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees.
Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
Ten years from now.
There’s no happy win-win story about that scenario, no way to pull it off while continuing to live US lifestyles and growing the global economy every year. It would require immediate, radical shifts in behavior worldwide, especially among the wealthy — a period of voluntary austerity and contraction.
That seems unlikely. So instead, let’s assume copious negative emissions technology will be available in the latter half of the century, just to give ourselves the most room possible.
In those scenarios, how much of the world’s fossil fuels can we burn? How much more can we find and dig up?
That math is daunting.
Staying beneath 2 degrees means ceasing all new fossil fuel development First, a quick tour of terminology. There are fossil fuel resources (what is ultimately recoverable), reserves (what is known and economically recoverable), and developed reserves (what is known and recoverable in currently operating mines and fields). Here’s a handy guide:
Now let’s compare some numbers. It’s pretty straightforward. Roughly 95 percent of the carbon contained in fossil fuels gets released into the atmosphere, so a ton dug up means a ton emitted, more or less. [Correction 10/6/2016: This was misleadingly phrased. To clarify: 95 percent of the carbon in fossil fuels end up being burned; each ton of carbon burned yields roughly 3.6 tons of CO2.]
How do our carbon budgets compare with our fossil fuel reserves?
Another terrifying image.
On the left is global developed fossil fuel reserves. Remember the terminology: That’s what we can likely get out of currently operating fields and mines. On the right are our carbon budgets, for the 2 degree and 1.5 degree scenarios respectively. Existing developed reserves exceed the 2 degree budget, and oil and gas alone break the 1.5 degree budget.
If we are serious about what we said in Paris, then no more exploring for new fossil fuels. No new mines, wells, or fossil fuel infrastructure. And rapid, managed decline in existing fossil fuels.
We are betting our species’ future on our ability to bury carbon An important note: The analysts at Oil Change assume that there will be BECCS from midcentury onward, but assume that CCS will not come online fast enough to substantially delay the decline of fossil fuels before then.
Obviously, that assumption could be wrong on either end. CCS could develop faster than expected or turn out to be utterly impractical and too costly on any time scale. It’s too soon to know.
What is clear is that we are betting our collective future on being able to bury millions of tons of carbon. It’s a huge and existentially risky bet — and maybe one out of a million people even know it’s being made.
Humanity is in a desperate situation There are modeling scenarios that show us hitting our climate targets. But we should take no comfort from them. The fact is, we have waited until perilously late to act on climate change, and our range of options has narrowed. We face three choices:
1) In the event that massive carbon sequestration proves infeasible, avoiding dangerous climate change will require an immediate and precipitous decline in global carbon emissions over a decade or two. Given that most present-day economic activity is driven by fossil fuels, it would mean, at least temporarily, a net decline in economic activity. No one wants to discuss this, except climate scientist Kevin Anderson:
2) The second option is to immediately begin driving net global emissions down, hitting zero some time midcentury or shortly thereafter, and in the meantime develop the technology and infrastructure to bury millions of tons of carbon from biomass. Anderson explains just what that means:
The sheer scale of the BECCS assumption underpinning the [Paris] Agreement is breathtaking – decades of ongoing planting and harvesting of energy crops over an area the size of one to three times that of India. At the same time the aviation industry anticipates fuelling its planes with bio-fuel, the shipping industry is seriously considering biomass to power its ships and the chemical sector sees biomass as a potential feedstock. And then there are 9 billion or so human mouths to feed.
3) The third option is to allow temperatures to rise 3 or even 4 degrees, which Anderson has called "incompatible with an organized global community." Such temperatures would bring suffering to hundreds of millions of people and substantially raise the probability of runaway global warming that can’t be stopped no matter what humans do. Runaway warming would, over the course of a century or so, serve to render the planet uninhabitable. Quite a legacy.
All of these are desperate options.
When climate activists say, "We have the technology; all we need is the political will," they act like that’s good news. But think about the political will we need: to immediately cease fossil fuel exploration, start shutting down coal mines, and put in place a plan for managed decline of the fossil fuel industry; to double or triple the global budget for clean energy research, development, and deployment; to transfer billions of dollars from wealthy countries to poorer ones, to protect them from climate impacts they are most vulnerable to but least responsible for; and quite possibly, if it comes to it, to limit the consumptive choices of the globe’s wealthiest and most carbon-intensive citizens.
That level of political will is nowhere in evidence, in any country.
So for now, it’s cognitive dissonance.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
The Age of Stupid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father, The Usual Suspects, Brassed Off) as a man living in the devastated future world of 2055, looking back at old footage from our time and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016) Climate change and ocean acidification have killed off one of the most spectacular features on the planet. By: Rowan Jacobsen Oct 11, 2016
For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 1,400 miles long, with 2,900 individual reefs and 1,050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1,625 species of fish, 3,000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.
The reef was born on the eastern coast of the continent of Australia during the Miocene epoch. Its first 24.99 million years were seemingly happy ones, marked by overall growth. It was formed by corals, which are tiny anemone-like animals that secrete shell to form colonies of millions of individuals. Its complex, sheltered structure came to comprise the most important habitat in the ocean. As sea levels rose and fell through the ages, the reef built itself into a vast labyrinth of shallow-water reefs and atolls extending 140 miles off the Australian coast and ending in an outer wall that plunged half a mile into the abyss. With such extraordinary diversity of life and landscape, it provided some of the most thrilling marine adventures on earth to humans who visited. Its otherworldly colors and patterns will be sorely missed.
To say the reef was an extremely active member of its community is an understatement. The surrounding ecological community wouldn’t have existed without it. Its generous spirit was immediately evident 60,000 years ago, when the first humans reached Australia from Asia during a time of much lower sea levels. At that time, the upper portions of the reef comprised limestone cliffs and innumerable caves lining a resource-rich coast. Charlie Veron, longtime chief scientist for the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef’s most passionate champion (he personally discovered 20 percent of the world’s coral species), called the reef in that era a “Stone Age Utopia.” Aboriginal clans hunted and fished its waters and cays for millennia, and continued to do so right up to its demise.
Worldwide fame touched the reef in 1770, when Captain James Cook became the first European to navigate its deadly maze. Although the reef was beloved by nearly all who knew it, Cook was not a fan. “The sea in all parts conceals shoals that suddenly project from the shore, and rocks that rise abruptly like a pyramid from the bottom,” he wrote in his journal. Cook’s ship foundered on one of those shoals and was nearly sunk, but after several months Cook escaped the reef.
After that, the reef was rarely out of the spotlight. A beacon for explorers, scientists, artists, and tourists, it became Australia’s crown jewel. Yet that didn’t stop the Queensland government from attempting to lease nearly the entire reef to oil and mining companies in the 1960s—a move that gave birth to Australia’s first conservation movement and a decade-long “Save the Reef” campaign that culminated in the 1975 creation of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which restricted fishing, shipping, and development in the reef and seemed to ensure its survival. In his 2008 book, A Reef in Time, Veron wrote that back then he might have ended his book about the reef with “a heartwarming bromide: ‘And now we can rest assured that future generations will treasure this great wilderness area for all time.’” But, he continued: “Today, as we are coming to grips with the influence that humans are having on the world’s environments, it will come as no surprise that I am unable to write anything remotely like that ending.”
In 1981, the same year that UNESCO designated the reef a World Heritage Site and called it “the most impressive marine area in the world,” it experienced its first mass-bleaching incident. Corals derive their astonishing colors, and much of their nourishment, from symbiotic algae that live on their surfaces. The algae photosynthesize and make sugars, which the corals feed on. But when temperatures rise too high, the algae produce too much oxygen, which is toxic in high concentrations, and the corals must eject their algae to survive. Without the algae, the corals turn bone white and begin to starve. If water temperatures soon return to normal, the corals can recruit new algae and recover, but if not, they will die in months. In 1981, water temperatures soared, two-thirds of the coral in the inner portions of the reef bleached, and scientists began to suspect that climate change threatened coral reefs in ways that no marine park could prevent.
By the turn of the millennium, mass bleachings were common. The winter of 1997–98 brought the next big one, followed by an even more severe one in 2001–02, and another whopper in 2005–06. By then, it was apparent that warming water was not the only threat brought by climate change. As the oceans absorbed more carbon from the atmosphere, they became more acidic, and that acid was beginning to dissolve the living reef itself.
Concerned for the reef’s health, a number of friends attempted interventions—none more poignant than Veron’s famed 2009 speech to London’s 350-year-old Royal Society titled “Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?” Veron quickly answered his own question in the affirmative: “This is not a fun talk to give, but I’ve never given a more important talk in my life,” he told the premier gathering of scientists, accurately predicting that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 450 parts per million (which the world will reach in 2025) would bring about the demise of the reef.
No one knows if a serious effort could have saved the reef, but it is clear that no such effort was made. On the contrary, attempts to call attention to the reef’s plight were thwarted by the government of Australia itself, which in 2016, shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.
By then, the reef was in the midst of the most catastrophic bleaching event in its history, from which it would never recover. As much as 50 percent of the coral in the warmer, northern part of the reef died. “The whole northern section is trashed,” Veron told Australia’s Saturday Paper. “It looks like a war zone. It’s heartbreaking.” With no force on earth capable of preventing the oceans from continuing to warm and acidify for centuries to come, Veron had no illusions about the future. “I used to have the best job in the world. Now it’s turned sour... I’m 71 years old now, and I think I may outlive the reef.”
The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral reefs on earth. It is survived by the remnants of the Belize Barrier Reef and some deepwater corals.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Ocean Ark Alliance.
We should never forget Galileo being put before the Inquisition. It would be even worse if we allowed scientific orthodoxy to become the Inquisition.
Richard Smith, Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal 1991-2004, in a published letter to Nature
Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have surged past an important threshold and may not dip below it for "many generations".
The 400 parts per million benchmark was broken globally for the first time in recorded history in 2015.
But according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), 2016 will likely be the first full year to exceed the mark.
The high levels can be partly attributed to a strong El Niño event.
Gas spike While human emissions of CO2 remained fairly static between 2014 and 2015, the onset of a strong El Niño weather phenomenon caused a spike in levels of the gas in the atmosphere.
That's because the drought conditions in tropical regions produced by El Niño meant that vegetation was less able to absorb CO2. There were also extra emissions from fires, sparked by the drier conditions.
In its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the World Meteorological Organisation says the conditions helped push the growth in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere above the average for the last ten years.
At the atmospheric monitoring station in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, levels of CO2 broke through 400 parts per million (ppm), meaning 400 molecules of CO2 for every one million molecules in the atmosphere.
The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was three to five million years ago, say experts.
Prior to 1800 atmospheric levels were around 280ppm, according to the US National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
The WMO says that the rise through the 400ppm barrier has persisted and it's likely that 2016 will be the first full year when the measurements show CO2 above that benchmark, and "hence for many generations".
While the El Niño factor has now disappeared, the human impact on climate change has not, the WMO argues.
"The year 2015 ushered in a new era of optimism and climate action with the Paris climate change agreement," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
"But it will also make history as marking a new era of climate change reality with record high greenhouse gas concentrations."
The report also details the growth in other greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide.
In 2015, levels of methane were 2.5 times greater than in the pre-industrial era, while nitrous oxide was 1.2 times above the historic measure.
The study also points to the impact of these increased concentrations of warming gases on the world's climate.
Between 1990 and 2015 there was a 37% increase in radiative forcing or warming effect, caused by a build up of these substances, from industrial, agricultural and domestic activities.
While welcoming new initiatives like the global agreement to phase out HFC gases agreed recently in Rwanda, the WMO argues that nations must retain their focus on cutting CO2.
"Without tackling CO2 emissions, we cannot tackle climate change and keep temperature increases to below 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial era," said Petteri Taalas.
"It is therefore of the utmost importance that the Paris Agreement does indeed enter into force well ahead of schedule on 4 November and that we fast-track its implementation."
Around 200 nations who signed the Paris climate agreement will meet in Morocco in November to decide on the next steps forward.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
New model suggests scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere
By Blaine Friedlander
New Cornell research suggests an economically viable model to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to thwart runaway, point-of-no-return global warming.
The researchers propose using a “bioenergy-biochar system” that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an environmental pinch, until other removal methods become economically feasible and in regions where other methods are impractical. Their work appeared in the Oct. 21 edition of Nature Communications.
“If we continue on current emissions trajectories, we will need to draw down excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if we’re going to avoid catastrophic levels of climate change. We’re offering a mitigation model that can do that. It’s not a silver bullet, but it may be among the tools we need in a portfolio of carbon dioxide mitigation strategies,” said Dominic Woolf, Cornell research associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author on “Optimal Bioenergy Power Generation for Climate Change Mitigation With or Without Carbon Sequestration.”
Among the recent ideas to cleanse the atmosphere of carbon is to plant huge regions of forests – called reforestation or afforestation. Scientists have also considered bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which bioenergy power plants capture their own carbon dioxide emissions, and then store them underground or in the ocean. BECCS is very expensive and impractical now, but could become a more viable option toward the end of this century, according to this research.
The new study suggests a system using biochar, carbonized plant matter made by charring organic material – burning without using air – in a process called pyrolysis. The bioenergy-biochar system, called BEBCS, is stable and lowers sequestration losses when carbon is captured. After the organic matter is turned into carbon-sequestering biochar, it can be placed into the soil as a fertilizer substitute and improve crop production.
Although it has been omitted from major atmospheric mitigation scenarios until now, the new model shows that including biochar in a suite of options unlocks the ability to achieve cost-effective carbon dioxide removal earlier and deeper than would otherwise be possible.
Woolf sounds a hopeful note: “We need a full suite of mitigation strategies. It’s quite possible to scrub the atmosphere and remove carbon dioxide to avoid runaway climate change – where we could transition to manageable climate change,” he said. “This isn’t purely about advocating completely for biochar, but we need to recognize that we have technologies in place that can help our atmosphere, and we should create an optimal portfolio for ideas.”
In addition to Woolf, the paper’s other researchers are Johannes Lehmann, professor of soil and crop sciences; and David R. Lee, professor of applied economics from Cornell’s Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Notice there's no mention of halting the devastation of the Amazonian forests or that of those in southeast Asia. Really, these technologies are not solutions, but diversions away from investing in technologies independent of fossil fuels.
There are reams of studies available on pyrolysis, and in my opinion they are a nightmare - expensive way to make charcoal, and how is it heated? Burning fuel, wood and garbage. Sequestering carbon is a non-solution, as this facility must not be capable of capturing 100% of the carbon it creates.
Charcoal has limited benefit to soil; compost has much more of a positive impact.
It takes trees 30 to 50 years to become effective carbon sponges.
So they better get planting. They've got a long way to go just to offset, to equalize planting to meet the current rate of loss. And then wait 30 years for each tree to grow to maturity.
And we haven't touched industrial emissions, just forest loss. So, how many of these facilities would be needed to actually make an impact?
I think just halting the destruction of our forests would be more effective at sequestering carbon than building and operating a great many "carbon sequestering" biochar combustors.
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