I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New.

Positive feedback loops, how do they work?

We've known about this for decades. An example: heating causes permafrost to melt releasing CO2 and methane, which cause more heat to be trapped, which melts more permafrost, which releases more green house gasses, etc.

Positive feedback loops tend to be very unstable, and can lead to runaway situations.

Can't wait for all those ice caps to go away and stop reflecting all the heat that they do reflect being white. It'll just add to it.
- And when the last ice is gone we will finally have revenge for the Titanic
- Looks like it might be a good idea to paint sections of buildings black and white, colour coded for heating lol
- Reflecting away heat is great and all but think of the profits.
- Worse, when that influx of arctic water shuts down the North Atlantic current and others that cycle heat and cold throughout the world. That will be very bad for quite a lot of us.
- I followed the links in that quote:
  Climate models have consistently found that once we get emissions down to net zero, the world will largely stop warming; there is no warming that is inevitable or in the pipeline after that point.
  Neither addresses tipping points. They seem to talk about something else entirely, like wether a model assumes constant atmospheric concentration, or constant emissions, that kind of difference.
Can't wait until we turn the planet into Venus 2.0
- Ive read somewhere that living in the clouds is in theory still possible. :)
People are really bad at conceptualizing exponential change from feedback. Our brains expect incremental change. I think that's one of the reasons people can't know accept what is happening.
"I know things are changing, but it's only a bit each day, and it can go like that for years and it won't be that bad."

As much as this news disturbs me .... the thing that disturbs me most is that most of the world will ignore it.

Humanity won't do anything about any of this until millions die and mass migrations start happening due to extreme weather events.

COVID was the perfect microcosm for climate change action. COVID killed a shit-pile of people really quickly. Humans are wired to acknowledge pressing matters (like a pandemic), while more abstract concepts, and things with delayed consequences get pushed to the wayside.
It make sense, why we are the way we are. Who cares about where your meal next week is going to come from, when you're a caveman running from a lion?
Does it make us any less dead? nope. Just the timing is in question.
- Even covid was already too hypothetical and abstract and too far away in time and space for millions of people to act cautiously. Climate change is further away still... When it becomes very noticeable, it's far too late: hawaii fire level stuff before people actually realise it's fucked.
I'm less optimistic than you, I think we will continue to increase fossil fuel usage, even though millions are dying and being displaced.
- Hell yeah.
  Thats for sure. Many finance analysts predict 3 digit oil prices.
  Investments will ramp up once demand puts pressure on the price.
  And fossil fuel industry will be the most profitable one again.
  WE CANT EXPECT OUR SYSTEM TO CHANGE WITHOUT CHANGING THE SYSTEM.
- What will we need all those fossil fuels for? Surely, at some point in the early 2030's, as capex for PV/wind turbines/heat pumps/batteries decreases and opex remains low, most people will have realized that fossil fuels are personally costing them money. The only business remaining may be plastics rather than electricity and heat. Granted, it's entirely possible fossil fuel companies successfully double down on plastics (which is what many are planning already).
Humanity won’t do anything about any of this until millions die and mass migrations start happening due to extreme weather events.
We won't do anything even then.
Well, not anything that'd help, at any rate. The worse things get, the more people will vote for conservatives and populists who will sell them easy solutions, which will likely consist of mass violence and rolling back environmental regulations because they inconvenience their voters. The only thing that will actually help will be the inevitable collapse of industrial society at this scale, but to get there hundreds of millions if not billions will die pointless deaths, especially if nuclear weapons are involved in the collapse.
- At this point I want collapse to hurry up so that the old fuck boomers have to deal with it.
It's already basically too late and once millions die it will be super mega too late no take backsies.
Dude I'm way passed it. I'm hoping to collect on my new beach front property and live large.

After reading headline: Thank goodness!

After reading article: Fuck!

relevant bit (I think, I didn't read the entire thing):
And while many experts have been cautious about acknowledging it, there is increasing evidence that global warming has accelerated over the past 15 years rather than continued at a gradual, steady pace. That acceleration means that the effects of climate change we are already seeing — extreme heat waves, wildfires, rainfall and sea level rise — will only grow more severe in the coming years.
- This is nothing new though. Climate Scientist have ALWAYS been fearing a runaway effect. It has a wiki page and all. The author isn't wrong, but it's click bait. It's not telling us anything new.
- I thought we knew this? I remember hearing that we're just now feeling the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from the 80s, and emissions have drastically increased since then.
- Good. Burn this mother fucker DOWN. This is what you wanted people. Soak it in, bitches.
Ah, my first thought was "Well, either we're less doomed, or more doomed. Probably gonna be the second".
It ends on a positive though - if the world gets to net zero, then (apparently) no further warming will occur (does this mean runaway warming -from lack of reflection via ice sheets, methane release from previous permafrost zones, etcetera - is no longer expected?).
We just need to push our politicians harder. Poverty and climate are intrinsically linked - we can improve things in the everyday person's life with green investment and policy.
- Here's the problems with net zero. First, it's a marketing term more than anything. But assuming it was an obtainable goal, it requires carbon removal techniques that have been shown by prototype and basic math to not be scalable to the task. Making another assumption that such emissions or their equivalent could be removed, we would need to go far beyond net zero into negative emissions to start chipping away at not only continued natural emissions from the mentioned runaway feedback loops already set in motion, but the historical carbon that still remains fro the last century or so of our pollution. If just net zero isn't scalable, the latter is magnitudes greater and impossible.
  Net zero is the new "1.5 limit". It's an easy to remember catch phrase for a goal post on wheels. As we pass the old 1.5 mark the new one is used to distract from continued growth of population and consumption, catering to the wired tendencies of our species to procrastinate when danger isn't immediately in front of us. "They'll fix it".
  I think the idea that if we can reduce our emissions warming and all that comes with it will also stop is also a subtle marketing being spread because most people don't understand that we're not the sole source of warming, we were just a small catalyst that started the reaction. And with most chemical reactions, at some point the catalyst isn't needed any more to sustain the rest of the reaction. We could stop all emissions right now (whether that be voluntary or not) and the Earth will continue to warm for decades or more just from environmental inertia and breakdown of the system, and then from the addition feedbacks that starts.
  The only "fix" for the CO2 issue (which is only part of the problem, but the focus here) is to remove and sequester enough carbon to bring us down to 300 ppm or less, aka preindustrial levels. Put everything burned by our industrial age back into the ground. Entropy alone says that won't happen, calculating the numbers of how much carbon that means is mindblowing. We throw around the giga- prefix like it's nothing, and yet the total carbon we would have to remove gets into the tera- and possibly peta- levels. It's insane.
  Net zero is a scam, nothing more. I'm not at all saying we shouldn't change, but don't believe anyone selling you a solution, as change means adaptation and preparation for a different and hostile world, not some science "fix" that will let us keep doing what we've always done.
  I'm sure my rant that started as a short reply will get some responses of "what about ?" Good luck showing me something new that changes the basic math of the problem. It's looking into some of these potential solutions and finding out the real problem that turned me into a hardened skeptic of anything "new". Show me the math that can tackle the numbers, then I'll consider it. In the end you can't fool Nature.
- if the world gets to net zero, then (apparently) no further warming will occur (does this mean runaway warming -from lack of reflection via ice sheets, methane release from previous permafrost zones, etcetera - is no longer expected?).
  I followed the links in that quote:
  Climate models have consistently found that once we get emissions down to net zero, the world will largely stop warming; there is no warming that is inevitable or in the pipeline after that point.
  Neither addresses tipping points. They seem to talk about something else entirely, like wether a model assumes constant atmospheric concentration, or constant emissions, that kind of difference.
  "Runaway warming", as I understand it, merely describes the outcome, the effects, while being agnostic about the causes. My current understanding is, we ruled out one possible cause. Tipping points like sea ice or methane hydrate are still on the table, AFAIK.
Smoke em if ya gottem
- Now there's a movie reference I haven't heard in a long time.

These threads are such a shit show. No one reads the article and then just has the conversation they want to have, other people who didn’t read the article think they’re summarizing it, and everyone walks away dumber.

Online discourse tends to be like that
I read the article but it doesn't say much that hasn't been said a thousand times before.
Thread is a mess though I'll agree on that.
Because why would I read an article that’s probably riddled with ads, when I could read a quick unbiased fact in the headline (edit: and an image) and get expert commentary in the comments (that often builds upon or refutes the article anyways)?
- Run an ad blocker. Firefox + uBlock origin does wonders.
  Reading the article is a prerequisite to not being taken by disinformation.

We've discovered the breaking point of paradise. Hope the next sentient species is a little less selfish.

Unfortunately, I don't know if it would be possible for another species to reach our level of technology or civilization. We built up our society off of easily accessible energy resources (surface-level coal being our first source of industrial energy). This energy excess allowed us to develop other sources of energy, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. But if you tried starting from zero again, you could never get to this point, at least along the same path, as you need a high level of technology to access any available energy resources. Thus, if any new species took our place, they could only ever rise to the level of the pre-industrial revolution.
- That's a good thing, right? The vast majority of the results of technology and "civilization" has turned out to be nothing but a curse on this planet.
- Perhaps if it’s a few million years later and all us dead humans have turned into coal and oil, like the dinosaurs of the past.
- They wouldn't be able to take the same oath we did but that isn't saying they could never get to where we're at more or less.
  The enlightenment spawn the industrial revolution but it didn't necessarily have to. Scientific inquiry could have eventually lead us to somewhere near where we're at now without fossil fuels. The path would look wildly different and there's a fairly high likelihood mass slavery could play a role in that but it's still possible.
  Kind of a tangent here but the book children of time goes into some depth on how the author thinks a race of super intelligent spiders could overcome many of the same hurdles we had to in wildly different ways to become a space-aring civilization. It's science fiction and obviously not an in depth study into how feasible it all would be but it did get me thinking that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
- It's really actually kind of fascinating when you think of how that energy source was made, with a mass die off of carbiniferous (I think) rootless trees, aka scale trees that all fell due to not being able to support their own weight probably because the incredible amount of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time, then the carbon from those trees got buried and pressed into "fuel diamonds", plentiful and packed with all the energy a type 0 civilization would ever need, but the very fact that using the results of that die off to power our species unabashedly, has doomed us, because we finally reached that ever important ceiling that ecologists/biologists are always talking about. We thought we outsmarted evolution and nature, but we are just as much a part of it as any other being or object.
  It's kind of beautiful to me.
What paradise? Us in the developed world, that are fortunate to have our basic needs met by mostly luck of the draw, are in a bubble. It's never been paradise, but now it's going to be utter hell.

Beginning to think we're going to hit 1.6c next year, not 2050.

Heating is accelerating. IF we stop adding greenhouse gases to the air, the heating should stop. It won't go back down without removing massive amounts of CO2, though.

It won't stop unless we also remove the greenhouse gases that we put there
- Unless I misunderstood, the article claims otherwise.
IF we stop adding greenhouse gases to the air, the heating should stop.
Unless we crossed a tipping point. If so, the heating could continue although we stopped.
@Neato @silence7
But how will the shareholders get that 17th yacht?
The atmosphere stores negligible heat (only weather, not climate), but the ocean has a much greater capacity than the atmosphere, for both heat and CO2 (mainly in the form of HCO3-), and it takes a long time (centuries - millenia) to fully mix the ocean. Also it takes ages for icecaps to melt. If you really stop adding CO2, concentration in the atmosphere will go down slowly as it mixes into deeper ocean, but not back to preindustrial, the surface temperature will likewise go down slowly and partially after a slight lag, but ice will keep melting (-> sea-level rises) for a while. Other gases and aerosols make short term response more complex.
There's no rule of thumb that summarises it, but I made an interactive model - here.
So we can continue on with increasingly worse warming of the planet, OR we can follow the plot of snowpiercer.
- Yeah. Go Matrix and scorch the sky. Definitely no unintended consequences.
- There are safer ways to sequester CO2.