BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: MaJoC the Filk
Date: 26 Aug 22 - 03:29 PM

Sigh. As every child knows, any resource you don't pay for directly is effectively infinite: Daddy will always refesh it. Sadly, too few grownups make it into positions of power these days.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 26 Aug 22 - 05:01 PM

In fact, it could well be the case that volcanic eruptions are made more likely on many island locations by a FALL in sea level. This tentative conclusion was reached after a study of the geology of the huge caldera of Santorini in the Mediterranean, which carries evidence of many eruptions before The Big One 3600 years ago (one of the biggest eruptions we know of in recent history or prehistory). These can be dated and correlated with changes in sea level.   

"The mechanism is quite simple: falling sea levels remove mass from the Earth’s crust and the crust fractures as a result. These fractures allow magma to rise and feed eruptions at the surface."

(Dr Christopher Satow, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography at Oxford Brookes University)

I suppose (though don't pretend to know) that there may be limited coastal locations at which phreatic eruptions (those caused by the interaction of shallow magma and ground water) may be made more likely by sea level rise, but that's just me pondering.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Aug 22 - 05:17 PM

That is an insightful and usful point Filk.

Earth is always on the move, constantly, if slowly, changing. Temperatures rise and fall in cycles over millions of years. The last ice age occurred just 16,000 years ago, when great sheets of ice, two miles thick, covered much of Earth's Northern Hemisphere. Though the ice melted long ago, the land once under and around the ice is still rising and falling in reaction to its ice-age burden.

This ongoing movement of land is called glacial isostatic adjustment. Here's how it works: Imagine lying down on a soft mattress and then getting up from the same spot. You see an indentation in the mattress where your body had been, and a puffed-up area around the indentation where the mattress rose. Once you get up, the mattress takes a little time before it relaxes back to its original shape.

Steve objects to my lay description of lighter and drierI used to simplify and communicate better, as we pump out water or gas or oil. Fracking poisons ground water and leads to earthquakes. Sometimes it leads to subsidence. I am most familiar with NY and midwest to Michigan which is still rising like an unburdened mattress. In Maryland just south of the former ice shelf we are sinking half a foot over the next 100 years. All this data is obtained by NOAA satellites.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: WalkaboutsVerse
Date: 26 Aug 22 - 05:24 PM

What the world needs most is birth-control - sweet human birth control - so that all those born (fauna, flora, folks) have a good life.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 26 Aug 22 - 05:47 PM

Isostatic rise has occurred with regard to Scotland, but Scotland is not in a seismically or volcanically active zone. The vast majority of these activities occur at plate boundaries. Imaginative proposals for other triggers require evidence of the sort that was gleaned at Santorini.

But this: "Steve objects to my lay description of lighter and drierI used to simplify and communicate better" is just my calling out lazy and downright unscientific statements (again!). You do not communicate science better by issuing careless and inaccurate "information." In this regard, allow me to also correct your statement about the last glaciation: it occurred from around 115,000 years ago to around 12,000 years ago. You put lots of energy into trying to defend your inaccuracies. You would avoid that if you'd just check your facts before posting. I haven't posted anything in the last few hours that I haven't checked on reputable websites first.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Donuel
Date: 27 Aug 22 - 10:32 AM

I can not predict volcanism and never have, but I can predict RUNAWAY man made global warming on a pace never seen before.
If you think things seem dire now, in 65 years the climate will be 10 times worse but mostly survivable in a very hostile way.
In 200 hundred years - not as survivable.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: MaJoC the Filk
Date: 27 Aug 22 - 11:16 AM

Obligatory XKCD: Earth Temperature Timeline. Scroll down to the end, and watch the graph turn at right angles.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Donuel
Date: 27 Aug 22 - 11:38 AM

Wow

I grew up in the same mountain range that Scotland has after being split away by the Atlantic ridge millions of years ago. It is the oldest eroded mountain range on Earth. I could climb them easily but a 'new' mountain range, no way.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 27 Aug 22 - 11:49 AM

Agricultural methods use polluting materials that will also kill people. Changing to regenerative methods will help a little.

I heard a story this week about municipalities and even individuals suing the top global polluters (LafargeHolcim is the largest cement company and seems to have drawn some of these suits) to cover part of the costs of dealing with environmental impacts. Hard to say if any of those will be successful or will impact how the companies operate. This article suggests it can be greener than it is now. "Decarbonizing"

Two aspects of the Portland cement manufacturing process account for the vast share of its carbon footprint. Cement is overwhelmingly made by burning fossil fuels like coal and petcoke in cement kilns—akin to large furnaces—to heat limestone (raw material) to very high temperatures (~2,640°F/1,500oC). The heat induces a chemical reaction that transforms the limestone into clinker, which is then ground together with gypsum to form cement. Emissions from fuel burning are responsible for ~40% of the lifecycle CO2 emissions in cement (often referred to as the embodied emissions) (Figure 3). The other ~60% are the result of an unavoidable chemical reaction (calcination) that occurs when the limestone is heated, which releases CO2 from calcium carbonate in the limestone.

Gotta find a cleaner way to make that clinker.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Mr Red
Date: 30 Aug 22 - 03:31 AM

The post before this one demonstrates a very poor understanding of vulcanism, unfortunately.

Ah! We have an expert. On everything. Specialising in vague negativity.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 30 Aug 22 - 05:38 AM

Checking my facts before hitting send does not make me a expert.

As ever, individual weather events, no matter how catastrophic, can't be ascribed to global heating with certainty. But the cluster of events this year across the world should be worrying us: unprecedented combinations of heat and drought in North America, China and Europe and now destructive floods in southern Pakistan following record rainfall, to name but a few making the headlines in just the last two or three months. Between 1911 and 2003 the UK highest temperature record stood at 36.7°C. In 1990, then 2003, then 2019, it was beaten. Last month the previous record of 38.7° in 2019 was wiped out not once but at 46 different weather stations, reaching 40.3° at one of them.

Of course, the deniers will always find grist for their mill. The North Atlantic hurricane season has got off to a very slow start. And there's always the next cold snap...

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 30 Aug 22 - 06:26 AM

Cheers for the timeline link, by the way. I forgot to mention it! Excellent stuff.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Donuel
Date: 30 Aug 22 - 11:55 AM

It's not a slow start at this moment. There are 4 depressions at once in the Atlantic.

I grew up emmeshed in nature from the Catskills to Rockey mountains, from the plains to the mighty rivers, from ancient sites to NYC. Lakes that had 6 foot pike fish are now sterile from acid rain. I have seen nuclear waste stored adjacent to playgrounds, secret pollution pipes and hazardous waste dumps bigger than most villages a few football fields away from Niagara Falls. I have seen people bleed from their mouth and ears from their brief exposure to hazardous material. I know what evils are now hatching from the bottom of the sea we thought we could hide.

Smiles on faces of children are changing to kids with dead or angry eyes. Perhaps I see things from an entirely different point of view but I don't see ruins, olde churches and palace sightseeing destinations as the wonders of Earth. I see injustice and pain, hunger and poverty. Be that due to empathy or pessimism I am not sure. Profound pathos and poverty are coming in my mind's eye as half the world will eventually become immigrants at the gunpoint of climate change.

These things I have seen do not inspire hope but hope for even a change too late is better than none at all.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 30 Aug 22 - 04:35 PM

A depression is not a hurricane.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 30 Aug 22 - 05:59 PM

As a point of information, there have been no North Atlantic hurricanes in August to date. That's quite unusual, but can be explained via meteorological vicissitudes rather than global warming issues.

Tropical storms/ hurricanes/ tropical cyclones have very different origins from Atlantic depressions. The latter are always linked to the jet stream, unlike the former, which are not. A very active zonal flow of depressions is completely unconnected to the genesis of tropical storms.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 01 Sep 22 - 05:51 AM

This table shows how the rise in atmospheric CO2 has accelerated since the 1960s.

Average CO2 rise
(ppm per year)

1960s        0.86
1970s        1.22
1980s        1.58
1990s        1.55
2000s        1.91
2010s        2.41

(Source: Met Office)

In addition, a milestone has now been passed in that CO2 levels are now 50% higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The current measurements are taken at the Mauna Loa observatory and historical measurements, the ones relating to the start of the Industrial Revolution, are gleaned from studying ice cores.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Mr Red
Date: 04 Sep 22 - 03:31 AM

Checking my facts before hitting send does not make me a expert.

And that doesn't include reading the New Scientist every week obviously. But hey! The response could have asked "where does the information come from?" But (mae culpa) someone's narcissism button was duly pressed and the eruption duly delivered. Is prodding our "PhD on everything (majoring in twitchy opinionates)" really a sport for intelligent people?

Of course we could have, and did, ask our own tame PhD Geologist, a Brother-inLaw, but hey! How much information do you need to silence a know-it-all? And is it possible?

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Sep 22 - 06:33 AM

Well I did give you the source for those numbers. You did get things wrong in your rather sloppy post about vulcanism and you won't find too many flaws in my last few posts. Not because I'm an expert but because I check my information on reputable scientific websites before posting. It takes a bit of effort but it's worth it I think.

Subject: RE: BS: climate crisis - how do we go from here?
From: Donuel
Date: 04 Sep 22 - 04:15 PM

What is climate change to wry trouble making poets?

It's knowing the massive bridge is out twenty kilometers away
and speeding headlong to try and save a little time and money
It's the dehissent execution of poetry of life on Earth.
It is quiet lieing to the children about the curse.
a melancholey bride dieing of uterine cancer.
It's the question that knows its sad answer.
It is the slow motion astroid of violence.
Its the fatal crash of Noah's ambulance
Some dieing of thirst in mere years
and others of hunger with no tears.