When it comes to climate change, it is the speed of the change, that determines the severity of the impact. And that’s important to note, because we don’t have any precedent for what is happening today in the geological record.
Here you can see the previous episodes of global warming induced mass extinctions, compared to our episode:
And here you have the chilling conclusion of a study on the PETM:
We calculate that the initial carbon release during the onset of the PETM occurred over at least 4,000 years. This constrains the maximum sustained PETM carbon release rate to less than 1.1 Pg C yr−1. We conclude that, given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years. We suggest that such a ‘no-analogue’ state represents a fundamental challenge in constraining future climate projections. Also, future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM.
Maximum rate during the PETM was 1.1 Pg per year. Today we’re at about 10 Pg of fossil carbon a year. So have fun with that. You’re not just pushing changes at a pace beyond what life can adjust to.
No, you’re triggering positive feedback, before stabilizing negative feedback can kick in. Sea level rise should stabilize the methane clathrates, but that will take centuries. And before that time, you’re already warming them. Methane is being released, all at once, before the hydroxyl radical can break it down.
But it gets better. The PETM did not involve the burning of fossil fuels, nor peat. We don’t know the exact source of the carbon, but we know that there is no evidence of soot or particulate carbon. What happened would have been a case of natural processes releasing large amounts of carbon. The most likely source are the methane clathrates, in response to some environmental change.
In other words… we’re going to get the warming from the burning of fossil fuels… and that warming is going to trigger the sort of self-amplifying positive feedback from natural processes like the destabilization of methane clathrates on top of the warming from fossil fuels.
These mass extinctions were triggered by natural destabilizing feedback loops, the sort of feedback loops we will trigger on top of the roughly four degree Celsius of warming over 200 years we’re getting from fossil fuels.
Now, if you had an IQ above room temperature, which none of the LSWMs commenting on my blog have, you would recognize the severity of a problem like this. And LSWM issues like “but China” or “it’s too expensive”, would take a backburner.
But you have a psychological immune system, that prohibits you from understanding the problem. I’ve never met a heterosexual working class white male without autism capable of understanding what we’re faced with. Their immediate instinct is to come up with one excuse or another.
Most people are idiots. They would be better off just accepting that they’re idiots, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with other low status white males at some barbecue, pub or blog. “They used to call it global warming before they changed the name to climate change.” Yeah, congratulations on revealing you’re an absolute moron who doesn’t comprehend what we’re dealing with.
We also get the occasional low IQ delusional degenerate showing up here in the comments, who insists that CO2 used to be much higher in the past. These people also imagine themselves to be unique misunderstood geniuses and I’m sure they can impress a lot of other low status white males at their local neighborhood barbecue when they bring up these arguments. But it becomes hilariously stupid when you realize that:
- The sun was fainter.
- The planet was not home to human life, or to any of the cereal crops that produce the majority of our calories.
- The problem is getting to that point. I can travel at 500 kilometer an hour too. But if I accelerate to that speed within a second, I will die.
And I think you people are too stupid to comprehend what a mass extinction involves: “I don’t care if 70% of species die, if I can still get my grassfed beef! I don’t want to live in a pod and eat bugs!”
When you read “70% of species went extinct” that is a euphemism for “the planet became mostly devoid of life”. It doesn’t just mean you end up with a planet full of rats instead of pandas and lions, although in the long run that’s the sort of thing that happens.
Rather, in the short-term, it means there’s almost no life left. Let’s look at the Permian Triassic extinction event, shall we?
Here’s what survived the Permian Triassic extinction event, this was the ancestors of all mammals:
This animal was the size of a big rat. It’s called Lystrosaurus. It lived in Antarctica, where it could survive the mass extinction because it hibernated. It was basically asleep in the cold, then gradually reconquered the planet because everything else had died.
They’re about 95% of all animals you encounter in the geological record of the early Triassic. This was the only time ever in our planet’s history, when one vertebrate species dominated the entire planet’s surface. Because all the other animals on land had died. That’s what happened, during the Permian Triassic extinction event, 252 million years ago.
How fast was the warming back then? Eight degree Celsius, over 60,000 years. You low IQ morons are getting about four degree Celsius, in a period of 200 years.
What do you think is going to happen? For large mammals with a long lifespan like humans, this is not looking good. I wish good luck to any hibernating rodents in Siberia: We’re counting on you to carry on the torch of life.
“But all the other low status white males say it’s not a problem! They’re not going to invite me to their fishing trip anymore if I say it is! They’ll kick me out of our militia group! I will be downvoted on the zerohedge comment section!”
I don’t give a fuck. Because I have autism, while you don’t. You’re a hypersocial normie who adjusts to consensus among your peers, you just happen to be a hypersocial normie born into the form of a low status white male. And do me a favor, don’t just believe me, open a book, read about this stuff yourself.
“Yes, we’re warming the planet up faster than when all the animals died and some ugly hairless rat from Antarctica had to repopulate the planet… but China!”
“And India!”
“Yes, good point Cletus! And India!”
And this is why I will happily sit hand in hand with the pink-haired they/them wokies and the underweight vegan moms on the street, as the police water canon crushes my eyes in their sockets.
Democracy is a mistake. Who thought it was a good idea, to give low IQ low status white males the right to vote? I need to know, so I can piss on his grave.
There is no moral obligation to worry about such things, we are all just vectors for genes.
Cherrypicking the timeline to show that apparently the current warming is larger/faster than anything we have seen is not very convincing. It’s more like the last 1000 years were colder than usual and now we are experiencing a reversion to the mean.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011GL049444
Did it ever occur to you… that temperatures on Greenland are not going to be representative for the rest of the world?
Read in, they’ve calculated its correlation to the global temperature. Stands at around 40% as far as I remember.
No, it doesn’t say that anywhere.
In fact, they’re actually saying Greenland diverges from the global trend, in showing no warming since the 1940’s:
>However, the Greenland temperature trend diverges from the global trend in the last 168 years, which raises the possibility that much of the trend is due to natural variability, and makes it more difficult to attribute the recent warming in Greenland to increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere [Box et al., 2009; Chylek et al., 2006, 2010]. For example, according to observed temperature records, Greenland underwent a 33% larger warming in 1919–1932 than the warming in 1994–2007 [Box et al., 2009], and recent decadal average temperature is similar to that of the 1930s–1940s [Chylek et al., 2006; Box et al., 2009]. A deviation of the Greenland temperature from the global average temperature trend is likely caused by regional climate variability via modes such as the North Atlantic Oscillation/Arctic Oscillation (NAO/AO) and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) [Hanna et al., 2008; Long, 2009; Chylek et al., 2010].
In other words, you managed to cherrypick the one place on Earth where you see no increase in temperature for the 2000-2010 period relative to the 1930’s.
That’s what happens when you follow LSWM gurus.
I just want to revisit your original comment.
>It’s more like the last 1000 years were colder than usual and now we are experiencing a reversion to the mean.
That’s big claim to make.
And what you bring to the table, is a study of Greenland. So that’s cherrypicked, you’re looking at one part of the world and pretending it’s representative for everywhere else, but fine.
And the study itself explicitly warns you about not being representative, but fine.
But then you say that we’re “reverting to the mean”.
But if you look at the graph:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/91eb38ec-626b-4783-a792-be036f55703e/grl28620-fig-0001.png
You see that the last year for which they have data, 2010, the temperature is more than -28 degree.
And if you look at the whole 4000 year period in that graph, you see the mean is about -31 degree Celsius.
So how exactly, are we “reverting to the mean”?
What this study actually shows is that we shot through the mean, 13 years ago.
It’s enough to make nuclear winter look appealing, isn’t it?
Yep.
I would prefer a nuclear winter to what we’re setting our descendants up for.
I checked and we’re still doomed:
https://scored.co/c/TheDonald/p/16biw1S4BA/only-hibernating-antarctic-roden/c
Anthropogenic global warming ratiod by MAGAts.
Why you dont get it
The very concept of the atmospheric window and many phases where CO2 followed temperature will make it unteachable to linearly thinking morons, aka 98% of all humans.
Ask anybody why a tiny amount of proteins (a few grams per day) are enough for us. They answer bc we are 70% water.
Then ask why a horse or an elephant needs only double or triple the amount of a medication compared to a human.
Then ask how deep would a cooled down, liquified atmosohere be. Not even academics get that.
Prepare to have an angry person in front of you. The academic even more so. Which leads me to ask: Why do you care so much about something unchangeable far in your future, if at all?
I enjoy this hot summer. Many tight pants and good views. May the next winter be epic and cull the bugs and the German gubermint.
Radagast, are we reading the same source, or we just have disjoint tunnel vision focus areas?
At least we are discussing it, and it is a good step.
To be abs clear, let me cite the paper
(https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011GL049444)
1. Correlation to northern hemisphere average:
“The Greenland temperatures of the past 1000 years were found to be significantly correlated with Northern Hemispheric (NH) temperatures (r = 0.35–0.44; depending on different NH temperature reconstructions) with an amplitude 1.4–2.3 times larger than the NH temperature likely owing to polar amplification [Kobashi et al., 2010].”
2. reversion to the mean:
“The current decadal surface temperature at Summit (2001–2010) is calculated to be −29.9 ± 0.6°C from the inversion- adjusted AWS record (Figure 1), and is illustrated in the 4000 year context (Figure 1). The current decadal average surface temperature at the summit is as warm as in the 1930s–1940s (Figure 1, top), and there was another similarly warm period (−29.7 ± 0.6°C) in the 1140s (Figure 1, middle) (Medieval Warm Period), indicating that the present decade is not outside the envelope of variability of the last 1000 years.
2. Current vs long term mean, while misleading it is still within ranges:
Overall mean is -30.7 with a std deviation of 1C. The average for the last available summit 2000-2010 is at 29.9C with a std deviation of 0.6C. Those two conf intervals are overlapping significantly. ”
“The estimated average Greenland snow temperature over the past 4000 years was −30.7°C with a standard deviation of 1.0°C and exhibited a long-term decrease of roughly 1.5°C, which is consistent with earlier studies. The current decadal average surface temperature (2001–2010) at the GISP2 site is −29.9°C. The record indicates that warmer temperatures were the norm in the earlier part of the past 4000 years, including century-long intervals nearly 1°C warmer than the present decade (2001–2010). Therefore, we conclude that the current decadal mean temperature in Greenland has not exceeded the envelope of natural variability over the past 4000 years, a period that seems to include part of the Holocene Thermal Maximum. ”
To finish this – I am not sure which one is true, but at least I am sure that the science is not settled for that matter. Insisting that it is, is the the same grade of deception the lockdowns were. the same entities are pushing the agenda, and the same “pink haired” them/they type of useful idiots are freaking about it. It seems to be a pattern, no?
Quote: “… we don’t have any precedent for what is happening today in the geological record.”
Currently there is an ice core diagramm (with official sources) going around on Twitter, where temperature and CO2 is displayed.
https://nitter.net/BenjaminYumi8/status/1652742377235267590
We can see that the situation is indeed exceptional for the CO2, but we can also see the temperature is following its usual pattern.
i love this blog. i came for the covid doomporn, i stay for the climate doomporn.
although i have to ask: why do you care so much? like, seriously, who gives a shit? 250 mya there was a mass extinction event, 200 mya there was a mass extinction event, 50 mya there was a mass extinction event. whoopty doo, shit happens. were there any blue haired woke dinosaurs haranguing the alpha chad t-rexes to lower their carbon footprint? did it matter? will the next intelligent species one or two hundred million years in the future have blue haired woke hyper-intelligent crows bitching at them too? will it matter?
here’s the thing. we humans are products of evolution on earth so that all of our effects on the biosphere are natural consequences of the prevailing laws of nature, just like the forests creating their own micro-climates. should we stop local wetting and cut down all the forests? we could all start eating our bugs and living in our pods tomorrow, but “but, China!” is literally a law of nature–whoever starts burning fossil fuels to grow their populations and economies is fittest and survives. you might as well mock LSWMs for knowing their times tables.
so we are part of some positive feedback loop that is a consequence of the same darwinian logic that allows that mole-rat looking thing to repopulate the earth. what stupid “operation warp speed” plan do you have to arrest the feedback? let’s be honest, we are probably 8-9x carrying capacity without fossil fuels so the die-off in humans and human-adjacent livestock would count as a mass extinction event too, and all these geoengineering proposals are either too small-scale to matter or are so large-scale as to fuck things up even worse. so i ask again, who gives a shit? because we are “making a hellscape for our descendants?” maybe, maybe not: making predictions is hard, especially about the future. also, you don’t have kids so again, why do you care?
the only way climate change should be viewed as something to be solved is through some form of religious belief that makes humans a chosen species, either a traditional one with a creation myth (in which case, who gives a fuck about paleontology and geology… it’s right there in the holy book!), or a fake and gay faustian techno-utopian vision of uploaded consciousnesses and/or fully automatic luxury space communism (in which case, who gives a fuck… the ai will save us!). otherwise, just chill out, all these predictions and calls to action are like, your opinion, man. we all die eventually, and humans won’t be around forever… we might as well enjoy the ride while we can.
Best comment here. It’s too late to turn the corner anyway.
Most oil and coal are already burnt, minerals scraped out of the ground, everything sealed with concrete. Air, water and soil contaminated… How to ever make this undone?
And most important: Far too many people to be able to feed them somehow. A climate protection plan would have to elimate primarily the superfluous eaters, because 10 calories of fossil energy are needed for each calorie of food. We can’t stop producing CO2 without culling humans before – or wait until nature will do it, which will happen anyway due to the inertia of the system. Disaster is pre-programmed, 6th mass extinction, here we come!
So as Michael said, enjoy the summer with its tight pants and good views…
Just about every day now we’re confronted with new data that every natural system we can study is diverging past anything that we have observed or measured. It seems inevitable that mass starvation is going to start this decade. It also seems inevitable that wars and conflict will increase as conditions deteriorate.
So, what I can’t understand is why the universe created one rock with life, and life created one species that dominated the rest until it destroyed itself.
Do you know what psychological defences you deploy unconsciously?
Right you are. One in four westerners today are mentally ill which, as Ethan Watters explained, simply means that they are “crazy like us”. In reality, one in every ten thousand is sane, and chances are he had to go through living hell to get there.
Limit population growth with this one simple trick:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/11/young-male-and-aimless-why-are-men-india-delaying-marriage
Thoughts?
Reminds me of the population bomb theory of the 60*s. Oh noo the population is growing too fast, is exploding even, then we will all starve by 2000. Taking a short term trend and extrapolating it to infinity excellent doomporn makes. Remember when bitcoin was supposed to hit 1 mil usd because , look at the trend dude, innevitabbility !!10!! better dump all your oldcoin this is the future.
Chill, trend will reverse, with a vengeance. Besides, bets on the end of the world don”t pay off.
Of course I would miss some humans and most animals if they were gone. But I stillI think that a world whose sole occupants were sociable, drowsy, vegan creatures would be Edenic. A fossil was just found (science daily, july 18th, 2023) of a carnivorous mammal attacking a plant-eating dinosaur. Whom would we want to win that fight? We love mammals because we love the creatures we are around, including the carnivores, but a world without them would be a kindlier one.
Hate to break it to you dipshit, but your chart is not real. 80% of the spike you’re panicked about is projected based on fake computer models.
@Radagast, I believe you follow nakedcapitalism.com. You probably read Satyajit Das’ series titled Energy Destinies – the latest episode is just out https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07/energy-destinies-part-6-energy-policy-and-emissions-hot-and-hotter.html.
Das is a practicing hinduist and a vegetarian. He supports simple living, is opposed to extracting coal from his new home country Australia, and he foresees and to a certain extent supports the end of affluence. If I remember correctly, he does not fly, is not on social media and does not have a mobile phone.
Hardly a climate denier or a cynical “but India/China” or “there is nothing to be done anyway” kind of guy. Yet not exactly enthousiastic about short-term solutions to the climate problem.
Everything you write is a product of authority. You can’t (don’t have the knowledge nor the lab needed) recreate any of the theories you are promoting (or bashing). It is the same old issue of authority over and over again. You have chosen what authority to pit your believea in and ao you are defending it.
So at the end is not about science but about who dispense the science and if his/her/their authority is accepted by you.
Think about it. The Dean of Stanford just reaigned cause he was caught falsifying data and conclusions in his research papers.