Dear Richard, my cyberian friend, take a breath. You are catastophizing way, way beyond any scenario where life in any form still exists. We currently have 1 trillion tons of CO2 in our atmosphere and we're adding another 40 gigatons (billion tons) every year. But, IMHO, the real issue is not CO2 but global heat production, of which CO2 is a contributor but the heat released by the burning fossil fuels is the real problem, as is evident in the 1.2 trillion tons of melting global ice annually, 3.3 billion tons DAILY. A woman in a recent presentation on my book, "Stress R Us", corrected me on the amount of heat energy absorbed by one pound of melting ice: 144 BTUs. So, all that melting ice is absorbing a helluva lot of heat energy, the combination of human generated excess heat from fossil fuel burning and the solar radiation trapped by the GHGs. A total number polymath Eliot Jacobson calculates to be the equivalent of 20-30 Hiroshima nuclear bomb blasts PER SECOND, where each one releases 63 trillion BTUs.
So, the burning of fossil fuels is a two edged sword: waste heat production and heat energy trapping GHG production. As for the permafrost, 6mm is melting annually throughout the 22% of the land surface of the northern hemisphere, as it absorbs another 144 BTUs per pound of melting ice. So, our planet (who ever said it was "ours"?) is screaming out that we are generating and trapping way, way too much heat energy and, as Jeff Goodell says in his book by that name: "The Heat Will Kill You First". According to C3S, the global ave. temp is currently increasing at a rate of 0.2 degC annually, so 1 degC EVERY 5 YRS.!
Don't waste your time catastrphizing about paleoclimate reemergences when we're already on fire, getting blown away by megastorms, drowning in the 10-14 trillion tons of water vapor we're pouring into the atmosphere, and (my interest and the theme of my book) dying in ever greater numbers from population density stress. We're rapidly heading toward the extinction of all life on "our" planet, so who cares about a million years hence? I'm 79, so I sure as hell don't give a care about the dismal far off future prospects of humans or any other lifeforms left after we finish decimating the planet from massive human overpopulation/overconsumption.
Excellent conjecture. Very well done. You;ve made the huge step.
Back in the mid 90s I reasoned in a similar way. My starting point then as with yours was the climate response in the 105k year Milankovitch cycle. The precise values aren't tremendously important.
I used 278 vppm as the preindustrial baseline and roughly the top of the 105k year ice age cycle.That then leads to a 13-15 C change in the Vostok or EPICA core data, less for the global mean. That also corresponds to a ~100 W.m^2 shift.
The keys to the temperature response then include:
1) The full response climate sensitivity is about 15 C at a ratio of 278/178 ppm/ppm CO2. That then corresponds to a ~ 9.6 C change per doubling of warming gases (as CO2), henve CO2(e).
2) The Earth system in longer scales has upper snd lower bounds where the CO2 changes cease to be controlling. I don't know the logic for those. But I accept based on paleoclimatology that that is true. And if true it suggests a maximum hot house condition st +11 C for global mean. Your suggestion for the limits at the pole might explain the mechanics of it.
3) Previous studies of the polar regions identified those periods as an "equable" climate. Think - flatter temperature profile from equator to pole.
3) Other changes happen as well which take us far outside the quasi-stable oscillation of the current ice buffered system, into a very different system. So extrapolations based on the simple rules will break down.
The changes at the end are stable. However, the transition isn't.
In the extreme of the hot house earth case, atmospheric pressure is something like twice todays'. Oxygen levels reach 35% O2 which is so high that forests will burn in dousing rain storms. Giant six foot insects lacking circulatory systems become possible.
But the transition to those conditions may result in far lower air pressures and lower oxygen content with high hydrogen sulfide levels - toxic levels.Under those conditions, small animals can survive, while large animals can't, other than a handful adapted to very high altitude conditions.
Most large animal life simple goes to sleep to become food for those that survive, followed by very rapid change.
The survivors become the basis for the environmental speciation explosion that fills all of the vacant evolutionary niches over the next million years, and then go on a further binge of change. Most species don't make it through that bottleneck of changing conditions.
For humans, a small percentage of people from four regions have high altitude adaptations that might allow them to persist in small numbers to form the basis of the next jump in the homo line into whatever comes next. Or - not.
Greenland and Antarctica still provide immense buffers to slow the transition.
Etc...
One of the difficulties is in getting people (researchers) to think beyond the models based upon current conditions, and to do as you did in looking to the past in order to see the future. It is only once you do that that it is even possible to ask the most vital questions and to think the critically important thoughts.
Such as: Given all of the implications of this, and knowing how hard we have pushed the earth, combined with how intransigent and limited humans are in there willingness to even consider the consequences of their actions beyond the very immediate near term (months), what then do we do with this understanding?
What possibilities does it allow?
Which responses might help?, snd which won't?
What more do we most urgently need to know?, to watch for?, to avoid? ....
I'm a seat of the pants type of guy. "What is happening right now? Is it getting better or worse? How fast?"
Answer those three questions with the information we currently KNOW to be true and what do you come up with.
All you guys are lost "what if's"
The "what is" tells us all we need to know. We will get the details as they explode across the headlines. The only question left is how fast this will accelerate, and that can't be determined any way but by observation.
Yep, drop into: https://climateandeconomy.com/ to see the daily recording of just how bad stuff is with the climate. Read about a month's worth of the climate news, and see just how many records keep getting broken. Drought, heatwaves, floods, atmospheric rain bombs, once-in-gajillion-years 'anomalous' events happening much more regularly.
Ric: "The only question left is how fast this will accelerate, and that can't be determined any way but by observation. "
Yuuuuuup. I remember when I first started seeing the 'faster than expected' posts on the r/collapse subreddit a couple of years back, and then those kindsa posts just started getting more and more frequent. That was when I first started thinking something was way off with the IPCC's predictions of "by 2100." Reading Richard's substack has driven home to me just how very dire things are and why it is the way it is.
I've seen enough now to regard James Hansen et al's careful views as a pretty reliable TLDR. His latest paper was shredded mercilessly by climate moderates and others, but here we are with data and cross-corroborating evidences that he is very likely to be spot on.
Excellent analysis, albeit sobering. I am not a climate expert, although I have been following the science and the research now for over 50 years. I have always assumed that our estimates of effects and timescales underestimated both the scale and size of change we have been unleashing, and that the models 'fitted' only because of time lags between the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the 'flywheel effect' that slowed putting that extra energy into discernable action, such as sea level rise.
The key message for me is that meaningful climate remedial action is already too late. So much CO2 is already released, so many 'trigger events' have been passed, unnoticed, and so many changes are already in the pipeline, that this runaway train with all of us onboard is already certain to fly off the cliff.
I have also noted how climate models always seem to assume everything else on Earth will be static whilst we release all that fossil CO2 into the atmosphere, like a nice neat experiment on a planet in a petri dish. For example, as the planet gets hotter and the ice at the poles melts and the seas heat up and the Earth's rotational stresses change and, presumably, the Earth's exposed crust heats up, at what point does volcanic activity increase? We already know the twice-daily tides generated by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun flex the Earth's crust by up to a metre, but if that crust is also flexed by different rotational forces, and has expanded due to higher temperatures, at what point do earthquakes increase in frequency and severity? How much extra CO2 would more volcanic and earthquake activity pump into the atmosphere? How much effect would more volcanic action, with both emissions and particulates, have on the speed of climate change? How much would it shorten the timeline to a doubling of CO2?
Much the same applies to methane in the tundra and methane clathrates in the shallow coastal seas. As tundra fires release forest and peat CO2 and methane, and as sea temperatures are now rising relatively quickly, and coastal storm activity increasing, at what point does methane overtake CO2 as our main climate change gas in it's short term effects? Shouldn't we be modelling with 'CO2 Equivalent'?
Sorry for all the questions but relax, I'm not putting you on the spot Richard - I don't expect answers from you!
But maybe those questions may trigger further thoughts and ideas and for you to consider as you try to understand, on our behalf, and then to explain it to us.
Perhaps like the Guest Lecturer at The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, telling us all what we can expect to see as we sit down to watch the spectacle? 😬
Dear Richard, my cyberian friend, take a breath. You are catastophizing way, way beyond any scenario where life in any form still exists. We currently have 1 trillion tons of CO2 in our atmosphere and we're adding another 40 gigatons (billion tons) every year. But, IMHO, the real issue is not CO2 but global heat production, of which CO2 is a contributor but the heat released by the burning fossil fuels is the real problem, as is evident in the 1.2 trillion tons of melting global ice annually, 3.3 billion tons DAILY. A woman in a recent presentation on my book, "Stress R Us", corrected me on the amount of heat energy absorbed by one pound of melting ice: 144 BTUs. So, all that melting ice is absorbing a helluva lot of heat energy, the combination of human generated excess heat from fossil fuel burning and the solar radiation trapped by the GHGs. A total number polymath Eliot Jacobson calculates to be the equivalent of 20-30 Hiroshima nuclear bomb blasts PER SECOND, where each one releases 63 trillion BTUs.
So, the burning of fossil fuels is a two edged sword: waste heat production and heat energy trapping GHG production. As for the permafrost, 6mm is melting annually throughout the 22% of the land surface of the northern hemisphere, as it absorbs another 144 BTUs per pound of melting ice. So, our planet (who ever said it was "ours"?) is screaming out that we are generating and trapping way, way too much heat energy and, as Jeff Goodell says in his book by that name: "The Heat Will Kill You First". According to C3S, the global ave. temp is currently increasing at a rate of 0.2 degC annually, so 1 degC EVERY 5 YRS.!
Don't waste your time catastrphizing about paleoclimate reemergences when we're already on fire, getting blown away by megastorms, drowning in the 10-14 trillion tons of water vapor we're pouring into the atmosphere, and (my interest and the theme of my book) dying in ever greater numbers from population density stress. We're rapidly heading toward the extinction of all life on "our" planet, so who cares about a million years hence? I'm 79, so I sure as hell don't give a care about the dismal far off future prospects of humans or any other lifeforms left after we finish decimating the planet from massive human overpopulation/overconsumption.
Excellent conjecture. Very well done. You;ve made the huge step.
Back in the mid 90s I reasoned in a similar way. My starting point then as with yours was the climate response in the 105k year Milankovitch cycle. The precise values aren't tremendously important.
I used 278 vppm as the preindustrial baseline and roughly the top of the 105k year ice age cycle.That then leads to a 13-15 C change in the Vostok or EPICA core data, less for the global mean. That also corresponds to a ~100 W.m^2 shift.
The keys to the temperature response then include:
1) The full response climate sensitivity is about 15 C at a ratio of 278/178 ppm/ppm CO2. That then corresponds to a ~ 9.6 C change per doubling of warming gases (as CO2), henve CO2(e).
2) The Earth system in longer scales has upper snd lower bounds where the CO2 changes cease to be controlling. I don't know the logic for those. But I accept based on paleoclimatology that that is true. And if true it suggests a maximum hot house condition st +11 C for global mean. Your suggestion for the limits at the pole might explain the mechanics of it.
3) Previous studies of the polar regions identified those periods as an "equable" climate. Think - flatter temperature profile from equator to pole.
3) Other changes happen as well which take us far outside the quasi-stable oscillation of the current ice buffered system, into a very different system. So extrapolations based on the simple rules will break down.
The changes at the end are stable. However, the transition isn't.
In the extreme of the hot house earth case, atmospheric pressure is something like twice todays'. Oxygen levels reach 35% O2 which is so high that forests will burn in dousing rain storms. Giant six foot insects lacking circulatory systems become possible.
But the transition to those conditions may result in far lower air pressures and lower oxygen content with high hydrogen sulfide levels - toxic levels.Under those conditions, small animals can survive, while large animals can't, other than a handful adapted to very high altitude conditions.
Most large animal life simple goes to sleep to become food for those that survive, followed by very rapid change.
The survivors become the basis for the environmental speciation explosion that fills all of the vacant evolutionary niches over the next million years, and then go on a further binge of change. Most species don't make it through that bottleneck of changing conditions.
For humans, a small percentage of people from four regions have high altitude adaptations that might allow them to persist in small numbers to form the basis of the next jump in the homo line into whatever comes next. Or - not.
Greenland and Antarctica still provide immense buffers to slow the transition.
Etc...
One of the difficulties is in getting people (researchers) to think beyond the models based upon current conditions, and to do as you did in looking to the past in order to see the future. It is only once you do that that it is even possible to ask the most vital questions and to think the critically important thoughts.
Such as: Given all of the implications of this, and knowing how hard we have pushed the earth, combined with how intransigent and limited humans are in there willingness to even consider the consequences of their actions beyond the very immediate near term (months), what then do we do with this understanding?
What possibilities does it allow?
Which responses might help?, snd which won't?
What more do we most urgently need to know?, to watch for?, to avoid? ....
I'm a seat of the pants type of guy. "What is happening right now? Is it getting better or worse? How fast?"
Answer those three questions with the information we currently KNOW to be true and what do you come up with.
All you guys are lost "what if's"
The "what is" tells us all we need to know. We will get the details as they explode across the headlines. The only question left is how fast this will accelerate, and that can't be determined any way but by observation.
Yep, drop into: https://climateandeconomy.com/ to see the daily recording of just how bad stuff is with the climate. Read about a month's worth of the climate news, and see just how many records keep getting broken. Drought, heatwaves, floods, atmospheric rain bombs, once-in-gajillion-years 'anomalous' events happening much more regularly.
Ric: "The only question left is how fast this will accelerate, and that can't be determined any way but by observation. "
Yuuuuuup. I remember when I first started seeing the 'faster than expected' posts on the r/collapse subreddit a couple of years back, and then those kindsa posts just started getting more and more frequent. That was when I first started thinking something was way off with the IPCC's predictions of "by 2100." Reading Richard's substack has driven home to me just how very dire things are and why it is the way it is.
I've seen enough now to regard James Hansen et al's careful views as a pretty reliable TLDR. His latest paper was shredded mercilessly by climate moderates and others, but here we are with data and cross-corroborating evidences that he is very likely to be spot on.
Excellent analysis, albeit sobering. I am not a climate expert, although I have been following the science and the research now for over 50 years. I have always assumed that our estimates of effects and timescales underestimated both the scale and size of change we have been unleashing, and that the models 'fitted' only because of time lags between the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the 'flywheel effect' that slowed putting that extra energy into discernable action, such as sea level rise.
The key message for me is that meaningful climate remedial action is already too late. So much CO2 is already released, so many 'trigger events' have been passed, unnoticed, and so many changes are already in the pipeline, that this runaway train with all of us onboard is already certain to fly off the cliff.
I have also noted how climate models always seem to assume everything else on Earth will be static whilst we release all that fossil CO2 into the atmosphere, like a nice neat experiment on a planet in a petri dish. For example, as the planet gets hotter and the ice at the poles melts and the seas heat up and the Earth's rotational stresses change and, presumably, the Earth's exposed crust heats up, at what point does volcanic activity increase? We already know the twice-daily tides generated by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun flex the Earth's crust by up to a metre, but if that crust is also flexed by different rotational forces, and has expanded due to higher temperatures, at what point do earthquakes increase in frequency and severity? How much extra CO2 would more volcanic and earthquake activity pump into the atmosphere? How much effect would more volcanic action, with both emissions and particulates, have on the speed of climate change? How much would it shorten the timeline to a doubling of CO2?
Much the same applies to methane in the tundra and methane clathrates in the shallow coastal seas. As tundra fires release forest and peat CO2 and methane, and as sea temperatures are now rising relatively quickly, and coastal storm activity increasing, at what point does methane overtake CO2 as our main climate change gas in it's short term effects? Shouldn't we be modelling with 'CO2 Equivalent'?
Sorry for all the questions but relax, I'm not putting you on the spot Richard - I don't expect answers from you!
But maybe those questions may trigger further thoughts and ideas and for you to consider as you try to understand, on our behalf, and then to explain it to us.
Perhaps like the Guest Lecturer at The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, telling us all what we can expect to see as we sit down to watch the spectacle? 😬
1. Paleo-climatology is a dubious source for discerning patterns in the short term.
2. A crisis that takes 100 years to play out is invisible politically.
Am I correct In understanding that a +10c rise ends all mammalian life?
Tbh anything above 4-5C mostly takes care of that short term. Might be a lucky one make it through. Perhaps small rodents.
Now's the time to be a dirty rat.