Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[Legbiter]

If that happens we're truly fucked.

Aside from the truly catastrophic mega eruptions that happen here once every millennia this one always scared me as a what-if when I first heard about it 30 years ago. The Gulf Stream stopping and triggering a new Ice Age, resulting in Iceland becoming completely covered with glaciers.

[The Larch]

If that happens we're truly fucked.

Aside from the truly catastrophic mega eruptions that happen here once every millennia this one always scared me as a what-if when I first heard about it 30 years ago. The Gulf Stream stopping and triggering a new Ice Age, resulting in Iceland becoming completely covered with glaciers.

Yeah, it's the one thing that has the potential to fuck several times over more people of all the possible consequences of climate change.

[Sheilbh]

If that happens we're truly fucked.

Aside from the truly catastrophic mega eruptions that happen here once every millennia this one always scared me as a what-if when I first heard about it 30 years ago. The Gulf Stream stopping and triggering a new Ice Age, resulting in Iceland becoming completely covered with glaciers.

Yeah - it's huge

[Tamas]

On the UN conference to chase entirely outlandish (and even then just half-enough) targets - like Berkut said, while trying to do what we can do reduce emissions, it seems also high time to start preparing for the inevitable - changes in agriculture patterns, mass dislocation of people etc.

The problem of course that it is politically impossible to prepare for such things - who can sell their voters they are working on taking in hundreds of thousands of unwashed refugees in about 10-20 years? So it will be an every country/tribe for themselves extravaganza when the real trouble begins.

[Sheilbh]

The problem of course that it is politically impossible to prepare for such things - who can sell their voters they are working on taking in hundreds of thousands of unwashed refugees in about 10-20 years? So it will be an every country/tribe for themselves extravaganza when the real trouble begins.

One of my darker theories/conspiracies is that the radical right/hard-core anti-immigration parties/politicians accept the inevitability of climate change and are thinking in exactly these terms.

[The Larch]

Adaptation to climate change and mitigation of its harshest consequences is already part of the long term planning for most countries, as it is taken for granted that it will be impossible to fully stop climate change and we'll have to live with a certain degree of it.

[crazy canuck]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-crisis-scientists-spot-warning-signs-of-gulf-stream-collapse

[viper37]

resulting in Iceland becoming completely covered with glaciers.

as opposed to... ?   

[viper37]

If that happens we're truly fucked.

Aside from the truly catastrophic mega eruptions that happen here once every millennia this one always scared me as a what-if when I first heard about it 30 years ago. The Gulf Stream stopping and triggering a new Ice Age, resulting in Iceland becoming completely covered with glaciers.

Yeah, it's the one thing that has the potential to fuck several times over more people of all the possible consequences of climate change.

I'd swear I read a publication earlier this week suggesting scientists were wrong about the Gulf Stream current chilling our hemisphere due to global warming.  can't seem to find it right now...

[Syt]

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/once-in-50-year-heat-waves-now-happening-every-decade-un-climate-report-2021-08-09/

Once-in-50-year heat waves now happening every decade -U.N. climate report

Aug 9 (Reuters) - Extreme heat waves that previously only struck once every 50 years are now expected to happen once per decade because of global warming, while downpours and droughts have also become more frequent, a UN climate science report said on Monday.

The report found that we are already experiencing those effects of climate change, as the planet has surpassed more than 1 degree Celsius in average warming. Heat waves, droughts and torrential rains are only set to become more frequent and extreme as the earth warms further.

It is the first time that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quantified the likelihood of these extreme events in a wide variety of scenarios.

The report found that once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are now 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years up to 1900 when major human-driven warming started to occur.

Previously once-in-a-decade droughts could happen every five or six years.

Scientists emphasized that these effects of climate change are already here, with events like the heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest killing hundreds in June and Brazil currently experiencing its worst drought in 91 years.

"The heat wave in Canada, fires in California, floods in Germany, floods in China, droughts in central Brazil make it very, very clear that climate extremes are having a very heavy toll," said Paulo Artaxo, a lead author of the report and an environmental physicist and the University of Sao Paulo. (Graphic on warming planet)

The future looks even grimmer, with more warming meaning more frequent extreme events.

Heat waves show stronger increases in frequency with warming than all other extreme events. Twice in a century heat waves could happen roughly every six years with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, a level which the report says could be surpassed within two decades.

Should the world become 4 degrees Celsius hotter, as could happen in a high-emissions scenario, those heat waves would happen every one to two years.

Carolina Vera, another report author and a physical climate scientist at University of Buenos Aires and Argentina's main agency for science research (CONICET), said there is also an increasing likelihood that multiple extreme weather events could happen at the same time.

For example, extreme heat, drought and high winds - conditions that could feed wildfires - are more likely to happen at the same time.

The IPCC has a medium or high-level confidence that many important agricultural regions around the world will see more droughts or extreme rain. That includes parts of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil that are major growers of soybeans and other global commodities.

"It is scary, sure, with the risk that fires, heat waves, droughts will affect humans in the form of weather and food insecurity, energy insecurity, water quality and health - mainly in poor regions," said Jose Marengo, a climatologist at the Brazilian Science Ministry's disaster monitoring center.

Marengo was not involved in the IPCC report.

For example, regions that are already prone to drought are likely to experience them more frequently, including in the Mediterranean, southern Australia, and western North America, said Friederike Otto, IPCC author and climatologist at University of Oxford.

Increased frequency of drought and heavy rain also are not mutually exclusive and are predicted in places like Southern Africa, she said.

The projections on extreme weather events laid out in the report reinforce the importance of curbing climate change to the levels laid out in the Paris Agreement, scientists said.

"If we stabilize at 1.5 degrees, we can stop them from getting much worse," Otto said.

https://www.axios.com/un-climate-report-global-warming-faster-ipcc-003e9e0b-ae85-4298-ad0c-09fe163b74f4.html

UN report: Effects of climate change even more severe than we thought

Global warming is happening so fast that scientists now say we'll cross a crucial temperature threshold as early as 2030 — up to a decade sooner than previously thought — according to a sweeping new UN-sponsored review of climate science published Monday.

The big picture: Atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher in 2019 than at any time in at least 2 million years, and the past 50 years saw the fastest temperature increases in at least 2,000 years, according to the new assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What they're saying: The report says that the connection between human emissions of greenhouse gases and global warming is "unequivocal."

It's the "strongest statement the IPCC has ever made," Ko Barrett, the panel's vice chair and senior advisor on climate to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters.

Why it matters: Warming is affecting every area of the globe, making the world a more volatile place, and the report connects the dots between extreme events and long-term human causes.

Weather and climate events are becoming more common and severe, it says, and rising sea levels are flooding coastal areas with regularity.

It shows we're running out of time to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Details: The IPCC looked at how long it will take the world to reach a temperature warming target of 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to preindustrial levels and determined that could happen between 2030 and 2035.

The 20-year period from now through 2040 will be the first to meet or beat that target, the panel found.

Even under the lowest pathway of future greenhouse gas emissions, the 1.5-degree threshold would be exceeded for a period of time.

Only rapid, steep and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts, down to net zero and eventually net negative values, could avoid exceeding 1.5 or 2°C (3.6°F) of warming over the longer-term, the report states. The world has already warmed by 1.1°C (2°F) relative to the 1850-1900 average.

The report also notes that many of the effects of climate change through 2050 are already locked in by the emissions to date, but there is still time to greatly reduce climate impacts later this century.

Yes, but: The world is nowhere near making the emissions cuts in line with the Paris Agreement targets, instead tracking toward at least 3°C (5.4°F) of warming, based on the latest emissions reduction pledges.

Between the lines: The peer-reviewed report, conducted by 234 authors from 66 countries who examined more than 14,000 studies, arrives at a hinge point in the global fight against climate change.

Leaders in the U.S. and European Union are seeking to enact strict new measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions and keep the 1.5-degree goal alive, with a pivotal summit slated for November in Glasgow. But consensus on emissions cuts among all of the wealthiest nations remains elusive.

It also comes amid an outbreak of extreme weather events that have killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest in a scorching heat wave, with devastating wildfires striking the U.S., Canada, Russia and the Mediterranean region this summer.

The report touches on tipping points in the climate system, such as the shutdown of the Gulf Stream and collapse of part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, categorizing them as low-risk but high-impact events.

Flashback: Compared with its first report in 1990, the IPCC's new climate assessment reflects global warming's transition from a far-off, future issue to a present-day crisis.

"The internationally agreed threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius is perilously close," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. "We must act decisively now to keep 1.5 alive." He called for the report to "sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet."

"The actions we take over the coming years is what will determine if we can get on the right path," Jane Lubchenco, the top climate official in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Axios. "So every action matters, every year matters, every fraction of a degree matters."

By the numbers: The report projects that global warming at the end of the century will range between about 1.3 to 5.7°C (2.34 to 10.26°F), relative to 1850-1900 levels, depending on emissions.

The "most likely" range of additional warming by 2100 spans from 1.4°C to 4.4.°C (2.5 to 7.9°F).

Regional temperature changes, however, will far exceed global averages, especially in the Arctic.

Sea levels are projected to increase under the intermediate to high emissions pathways by between at least a foot and a half to more than three and a half feet by the end of the century.

A rise of 7 feet by the year 2100, or even 16 feet by 2150, "cannot be ruled out," due to uncertainties about potential tipping points involving Antarctic ice melt.

The report warns of the occurrence of "compound events," in which various extremes, such as heat waves and drought, overlap and affect society in unprecedented ways.

It also makes clear how starkly different the current climate already is from that in which modern human civilization first thrived.

What we're watching: The report will heavily influence diplomatic efforts to secure new emissions reduction commitments from major emitters at Glasgow. It's also likely to further galvanize climate activists. A 2018 IPCC report helped spark the global youth-led climate movement.

Full report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

[mongers]

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/once-in-50-year-heat-waves-now-happening-every-decade-un-climate-report-2021-08-09/

Once-in-50-year heat waves now happening every decade -U.N. climate report

Aug 9 (Reuters) - Extreme heat waves that previously only struck once every 50 years are now expected to happen once per decade because of global warming, while downpours and droughts have also become more frequent, a UN climate science report said on Monday.

The report found that we are already experiencing those effects of climate change, as the planet has surpassed more than 1 degree Celsius in average warming. Heat waves, droughts and torrential rains are only set to become more frequent and extreme as the earth warms further.

It is the first time that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quantified the likelihood of these extreme events in a wide variety of scenarios.

The report found that once-in-a-decade heavy rain events are now 1.3 times more likely and 6.7% wetter, compared with the 50 years up to 1900 when major human-driven warming started to occur.

Previously once-in-a-decade droughts could happen every five or six years.

Scientists emphasized that these effects of climate change are already here, with events like the heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest killing hundreds in June and Brazil currently experiencing its worst drought in 91 years.

"The heat wave in Canada, fires in California, floods in Germany, floods in China, droughts in central Brazil make it very, very clear that climate extremes are having a very heavy toll," said Paulo Artaxo, a lead author of the report and an environmental physicist and the University of Sao Paulo. (Graphic on warming planet)

The future looks even grimmer, with more warming meaning more frequent extreme events.

Full report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Syt, big boring news that most people will ignore. 

[Tamas]

I read the next big UN report is next year, detailing the likely impact of the changes. I am looking forward to that one to figure out where to live.

[Berkut]

Just got done listening to a 3 hour podcast about the dangers of synthetic biology, and how to protect ourselves from the next pandemic, man made or natural.

One thing that was interesting....the costs of doing stuff to protect ourselves is rather trivial compared to the cost of the problem when it inevitably happens. They are not trivial in absolute terms, but compared to the cost of the problem, it is nothing.

Example: COming up with a system to categorize, evaluate, and test a large number of existing vaccines against the couple dozen know viral families would be incredible useful. There are vaccines (like the TB vaccine) that seem to actually have good effect on surprising, other viral families. The estimate the guy had for getting all these vaccines we know about, and running studies to test them against other viral families, and then collating all that data was something on the order of a couple billion dollars. This would be incredibly useful from the standpoint of understanding a lot more about the relationships between viral families of pathogens, and vaccine effect across those families and within them.

A couple billion dollars. Pfizer isn't going to do this - there isn't any immediate market for the information. But there aren't any funds to do it either. The TB vaccine was thought that it might have some use against corona viruses - some guy at Harvard wanted to run a study that would have cost something like $10 million. Could not find any funds for it.

We spend how many hundreds of billions of today's dollars on NORAD, defending against a possible nuclear attack. Trillions have been spent on defense, and we can get political agreement for that, no problem.

But someone wants to spend the cost of a B-2 on climate change? Or to defend against the NEXT pandemic? FUCK THAT!

Humans really are doomed.

[Razgovory]

What's synthetic biology?

[Josquius]

Met with a Italian friend in Switzerland whilst I was over there. This topic came up a little- his girlfriend is Norwegian and his hope is to move over there, with escaping the scorching climate being a bonus he has actually thought about.
It is a wonder with the Gulf Stream business whether people in Europe should be running north or south.