Why should we be worried?
Peat shouldn't be available to burn. It only burns when it has been disturbed by some significant environmental change (e.g. drainage/drought). Siberian peatlands should be moist/frozen through summer, but this year's heatwave has dried them out.
Peat fires in the Arctic are part of a number of positive feedback mechanisms in the climate system. They release old carbon in the form of CO2 & methane emissions, exacerbating global heating, and they leave behind a dark charred surface leading to localised heating.
Some tentative conclusions:
- at least some of these fires were ignited by lightning
This kind of Question might be unpopular but do those wildfires have any quantitative relevance in accelerating global warming?
Or ask differently how much of Siberia would have to burn to make any noticeable difference In the CO2 balance
These fires substantially accelerate the melting of the permafrost, both by the primary heat of combustion, but also by secondary effects like soot. Permafrost stores about 1500 Gigatons of carbon. Humanity has released about 650 Gigatons of carbon in total so far.
I wouldn't think so, simply being melted doesn't mean it's released, but the decay processes triggered by the melting and now apparently wildfires will start eating into it. It's likely very difficult to predict what proportion would eventually be released and over what time frame.
However it wouldn't take much in the grand scheme of things to negate any reductions in CO2 release we manage to make as a civilization, more or less maintaining the total current CO2 release levels indefinitely. That's a pretty worrying scenario by itself.
There's a lot of fires up north, typically about 500 to 800 fires in all of Alaska per year. It is important to realise that fires are a natural part of the ecosystem there. Black spruce (Picea mariana) trees "cause" fires to their own advantage - burning out other trees and then repopulating the area, squeezing out contenders.
This summer's exceptional temperature coincided with a bump in black spruce's pollen production causing everything to be covered in yellow:
> Spruce trees release pollen annually, but every three to five years there is a natural bump in pollen production. This cyclical process is called masting, and it flushes the forests every few years with spruce seeds, overwhelming seed-eating animals like red squirrels and white-winged crossbills, and thereby ensuring many uneaten seeds go on to germinate.
Forest fires. Not sure how common peat fires are - don't know almost anything about them. Looks like a much bigger deal (because it's rare, hence the ecosystem/communities are not prepared to deal with them).
> Pierre Markuse, a satellite imagery processing guru, has documented some of the blazes attacking the forests and peatlands of the Arctic.
I was just there a few weeks ago. Reduced visibility in many places due to smoke, many "thank you firefighters!" signs along the road, helicopters picking up water from some of the millions of Alaskan lakes. It's still a very beautiful place.
This isn’t about local ecosystem disruption. It’s about releasing more global warming gasses into the atmosphere than humans have produced since the start of the industrial revolution.
> Trees and other vegetation are the planet’s carbon storage closet – absorbing and releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in an ongoing cycle. But just how big is that potential? A study from December has calculated that the world’s vegetation, from Amazonian rainforests to Eurasian grasslands, may hold about 450 billion tonnes of carbon today.
> From 1870 to 2014, cumulative carbon emissions totaled about 545 GtC. Emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (approx. 230 GtC or 42%), ocean (approx. 155 GtC or 28%) and the land (approx. 160 GtC or 29%).
Elsewhere in the comments someone mentions that the released carbon from all peat burning is about 2.5 times more than all emissions since the start of the industrial revolution.
> The important question is whether there is more fires than usual or less fires than usual.
Copernicus's post [0], linked in the article:
"Although wildfires are common in the northern hemisphere between May and October, the latitude and intensity of these fires, as well as the length of time that they have been burning for, has been particularly unusual."
It also shows a chart of the of heat output from wildfires in June 2019 compared to the the 2003–2018 average.
As I understand this is more of a mechanism for controlling the production of seeds. The idea is simple: producing seeds increases the population of seed-eating animals. But if the trees coordinate and keep on releasing few seeds, then many all of a sudden, then animals will be overwhelmed by the food supply and much of it will go to uneaten, therefore more seeds will germinate. Next breeding cycle there may be more animals (because the forests were all-you-can-eat buffets), but the seeds supply will be low again, reducing the animal population.
I'm not sure what's the specific mechanism of coordination (i.e. the specific signal that selects the many-seeds years), the article does not explain it. But it coincided with very high temperatures this year, on top of the persistently increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere (plants love the CO2 levels we've generated).
One person studying climate change at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories opined that the U.S. would not take climate change seriously until it loses a major city.
I'm not sure anything outside the Northeast does. There were many calls to stop funding post-hurricane reconstruction until Sandy hit. Puerto Rico is still struggling to get funding years after Irma and Maria, and Houston is debating if they really want to stop construction in the Addicks reservoir and surrounding areas.
And would admit clearly that it is something we can change and start promoting policies that help move society in the right direction. Instead they are censoring themselves and the organization is all but toothless.
A lot of people (myself included) would say that the Paris Agreement gave up too much for too little. If everyone followed the limits there, the climate would still be fucked - and those limits were far more restrictive for countries like the US than the developing world. And while it might be reasonable to say that it's not fair to ask for those countries to give up their chance of getting out of poverty, it still leaves the problem. I can accept giving up things to save the climate. I, and many others, can't accept giving up things to see the world go to hell anyways.
Agreements are stepping stones to work together, allowing you to reposition your country in the global scheme to be in a better place when a new harsher agreement comes.
It's not obvious what you want to say, but the Paris agreement would have been a piece of cake if we had taken responsibility.
The first step in solving our problems, political or otherwise, is being honest about them. No matter where on the political spectrum you fall, every voting American knows that one side has pushed the idea that climate change is a hoax while the other has been trying to take action.
I’m not sure what the motivation of your question is. Proving that democrats have attempted action while the republicans have chosen to ignore science, is such low hanging fruit that I’m a bit baffled.
> NYC was crippled by Sandy, and that didn’t lead to any changes.
This is what I was referring to. Would the Democrats have implemented more hurricane protections?
I don't think either party has any sort of sane carbon-reducing policy. The Republicans are obviously insane, but the Democrats seem to be focused more on attacking politically charged targets than on actually getting things done. You say they've "attempted" action - I'd say they've implemented things that are more virtue signaling than effective. (plastic bag bans, straw bans... These are not the actions of someone who cares about the environment more than political point-scoring)
Discussing improved hurricane protections is shifting the conversation to addressing symptoms rather than root causes. The conversation thread starts with the assertion that the US will be unable to take climate change seriously until a major city is lost.
While you make fair points, you're not disagreeing with general trends. Democrats have made moves to address emissions, while Republicans are struggling to admit there is even a problem. We do live in a Democracy, and politicians do have to work within the reality of what can be passed. The general public is the problem. Until the public has a strong appetite for addressing climate change, no meaningful change will happen. Any leader making bold moves prior to that is just going to be voted out. The scary conclusion at the root of this thread is that the public will lack that will until a major city is lost.
Hurricanes are not symptoms of climate change. At least, not empirically validated symptoms.
“We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is
not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic.”
Critiques like this are utterly unhelpful. If you truly believe the Republicans are insane then try turning your efforts to neutralizing them instead of wagging your finger at the people making an effort to improve things, however inadequate. They're working on small things both to raise public awareness and because that's all that's possible while the other major party is detached from reality but still wields most of the power at the national level. You don't have much political capital to make a difference as an individual (like most of us) so complaining about limited progress is a net negative.
> It is the same with deep technical debt, change only comes after major outage and enormous loss.
I so wished that were true. But there are - unfortunately - plenty of examples where even that does not make any difference. Improvement starts with knowing that you can do better and how to do better, upper management can be quite clueless and usually people that have some mobility will have left the company long before such a crisis hits. The people responsible tend to want to do better but do not know how, even when given the resources.
This sort of organizational dis-functionality is more common than you might think.
Although not a popular word these days, but what about tariffs?
If First World Country A sees Emerging Market Country B as major contributor to global climate change (affecting A) it could impose tariffs on goods from B.
It could be argued, that B’s products were unfairly subsidized by B having no environmental restrictions (from energy production and worker’s health to waste disposal etc).
Of course tariffs also hurt A’s citizens - but I’d consider it a fair deal: A’s people pay a price for being convinced that climate change needs to be tackled.
At least - considering how climate policy is usually a first world issue while those same countries are only contributing small fractions to world’s share of emissions (ex. USA) - it seems odd that those First world countries usually directly punish their own citizens (that have limited impact on climate change) instead of the main polluters in emerging markets.
There could really come a point when the US and other countries truly makes this their primary global policy priority, and both make the sacrifices themselves and applies what pressure they have on others to make this happen.
My "nuclear attack" option is a caricatured and unrealistic version of this, but a humbler version can certainly happen.
Though the problem with these things is that we're talking about a Public Good. In the strict economic sense: I should do something that's bad for me, but good for everybody. These things strongly tend not to get done unless someone is forcing it done.
Which leads us to a world government. Which actually scares me a lot more than global warming!
That's just a lack of imagination. The worst case option is that we pay them to stop. The best case option is that they balance getting their population out of poverty with ensuring they have a population at all in the next 100 years on their own.
But there is a massive spectrum of options in there: import-side carbon tariffs to make their goods less competitive, WTO policies to mandate carbon taxes, literally paying them to put emission mitigation in,...
The US doesn't need to lift a finger. Climate change will severely disrupt China and India's populations, and likely lead to the collapse of some neighboring nations - it's an existential threat they are motivated to address.
The US doing nothing will hardly serve as encouragement. And India also has major coastal cities threatened by climate change. Maybe China does too.
Overall "but China and India" is a cop-out, a convenient excuse for doing nothing. China and India are actually investing in renewable energy - unlike many developed countries who have their heads stuck in the sand. And they're justified in pursuing a growth agenda because otherwise who's going to help them when the climate change sh*t hits the fan? Developed countries haven't done squat so far, so can they be counted on to help in future?
US emits more per capita than any other country and China is actually on a path to enacting carbon pricing on what amounts to a significant chunk of global emissions.
There was a segment on the news yesterday about how impossibly polluted new delhi was and that made expats leave their jobs. That might be another point of pressure.
Sad but true. We already saw a ton of victim-blaming after Katrina.
If the US falls apart before New Orleans drowns, I really hope that the Monarch of the Grand City-State of Nawlins has the sense to allocate a lot of her budget of freshly-minted Fleur-Dou-Bloons to the Krewe of Sewerage and Water, because those pumps are about the only thing keeping the city from being a lake bottom.
I grew up there and I have said it so many different ways. Mostly “Noowarlins”. I sure saw it rendered as “N’awlins” a lot in Bunny Matthews’ “Vic and Nat’ly” comic about a couple of Yats (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_English) when I was growing up.
I’ve also just come back after spending half a life in the furthest corners of the US so what the hell do I know though.
Yeah, assuming by "lose" they mean the city gets pretty much entirely wiped out in a short timespan and never recovers. If it takes too long for the effects to fully set in or if the city recovers then I'd expect people will just carry on.
No, this is a lack of political will problem, worldwide. Renewables can supply all the power we need. We just need to build a lot of them and switch heating and transportation over to electricity.
Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions at a lower rate than the US recently. The US has benefited from cheap natural gas displacing coal, while Germany has gutted its solar program and (more recently) stopped building new wind turbines. Meanwhile Germany still burns lignite to supply about 25% of its electricity (a rate that has been fairly stable for as long as I can find numbers, at least thirty years).
In 2002 Germany had an energy mix of 22% hard coal, 27.8% lignite and 30% nuclear. Nowadays it has 9.7% hard coal, 19.9% lignite, 13.2% nuclear and 47.2% renewable energy. It's merely a matter of time and political will.
This narrative is very funny because it plays into boomer tendency of hating renweables. Germany showed that it's possible as long as you don't give up along the way. Countries like China or the US never started doing anything in the first place so criticism coming from those countries is just plain hypocritical. "I don't want it and now I don't have to because haha look at Germany, what a loser, haha"
Thank you for pointing this out, as a German it's kinda grating to keep on reading this kind of stuff, which also regularly frames the German nuclear exit as some kind of knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima.
When in reality the exit was already decided as far back as 2000, with the Bundestag ratifying it in 2002 [0]. A decision which was backed up by the EGG [1], a regulatory framework to facilitate and subsidize the large scale expansion of renewable energy sources that has been happening in Germany for over a decade now.
As such, I'd like to think we've been a bit ahead of the curve in terms of recognizing the problem and actually doing something against it. In that context, the still on-going use of coal ain't exactly great, but the reasons for that are way more political (miner jobs) than anything else.
I find it incredible to hear the stuff people spout about Germany.
Germany's decision to pay higher prices for electricity is what really kick started the downward spiral in solar prices. Germany proved solar wasn't just possible, but feasible. And every country has benefited from Germanys decision.
Germany itself has likely benefited, even if they had stops and starts along the way, and some minor setbacks.
That’s worrisome since peat is rich in carbon, and fires can release it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Peat fires can also burn underground into the winter and reignite in spring
This is scary.
I lived through peat fires, those can last decades. And it makes forest very dangerous to walk, it’s possible to fall into a hole created by peat fire.
The irony is climate change fucking up parts of the planet not many people “man on the street” types care for that much. If it affected populous wealthy areas first it’d be an emergency and we might be more motivated to change things.
The lands around the Arctic Ocean are really dry, since the winds off the Arctic Ocean blow over ice much of the year. Therefore, in summer what vegetation there is may rapidly dry out on the surface and burn easily.
Once the Arctic Ocean is open more of the year, more precipitation should be delivered to the surrounding areas.
One interesting fact is that a desert is a place without precipitation - many very cold areas don't have much evaporation and thus don't have much precipitation.
The area around Deadhorse, Alaska (Prudhoe Bay) is technically a desert with an average yearly precipitation of 153 mm. A desert is anything below 250 mm a year. But just look at the map surrounding it - there's thousands of lakes:
Lakes are supported from below by a thick layer of permafrost which is completely unpenetrable to liquid water. Combined with low evaportation - it is one of the most moist pieces of land on the planet. And a desert at that :)
likewise. I really struggle with the concept that all the feedback loops are positive and will lead to runaway change.
How will the warming of the Arctic affect plant growth? It seems logical to expect lots more plants up there as the permafrost shrinks and exposes more fertile country. Is that a optimism I can cling to? ;)
We need large scale meat farming in arctic, Pleistocene Park [1] but for commercial purposes. It would restore grasslands that we have destroyed buy driving arctic megafauna to extinction, would prevent peat fire, and uncontrolled melting of permafrost, and would save some of tropical forests from being cut down for meat production.
Whoever developed Gizmodo frontend probably never read any article on it. That's some really bad image load animation. That solid 1 second delay hardcoded in CSS + network delay for lazy loading just leaves the whole article a white canvas while I scroll.
Why would you want to re-hide the image after I scroll out of it? Scrolling back up gives me that 1 second penalty to make the image visible. So frustrating.
I have 2 Awairs - most of the time the number is over 90 (which is good) but it also measures individual values as well as that overall score
My company has a different one in the office in SF, and that one publishes to the net so the results are available to employees to see if they should stay home
Out of curiosity, do you feel filtering like this actually prevents anything? I'm not questioning the filters but rather the graveness of the threat in the first place (except for the elderly etc.).
The smoke in SF last year made me sick, and air quality rarely bothers me. It’s not just carbon soot, there are all kinds of cyclic hydrocarbons produced by smoldering green wood. It’s much worse than campfire smoke.
Yes, many healthy people were sick in Seattle last year and they were recommending wearing masks outdoors. Anecdotally, I experienced headaches and sluggishness when I didn't wear a mask.
If you'd like to know how imagery like this is discovered in the first place it's worth following NOAA's Daily Significant Imagery report. Which I no longer follow and can't seem to find a working link for right now.
I am now going through "Climate Change in a Nutshell: The Gathering Storm" paper by James Hansen [0]. It seems to give a good overview of the current state of the art.
Same author who wrote the New York Magazine story on Climate Change a little while back, which scared the pants off everyone.
Promoted debate over whether fear is a good or bad motivator to get people to change behavior. My personal opinion is that it is. Or at a minimum, the watered down, conservative IPCC narratives really failed to move politicians and the general public.
I think the models did consider this. And in such models, this is one of the "tipping points" (along with sea ice / glacier ice melting) beyond which it becomes much more difficult to reverse the process.
Anyone who isn't scared now should read this, idk what comes next, but we, as a species, should prepare for the worst.
Sounding alarmist? I hope so, but i fear not.
There are just too many people who refuse to care - I do do what I can to help the environment, but the people around me don't and it's clear that they never will.
Still, hope is a wonderful thing, and I don't begrudge you wanting to hold onto it for a little longer.
If everyone with a brain and a conscience would do their best, independently of everyone else, this wouldn’t even be a problem. Now too many uses everyone’s else inaction as an excuse for their own.
Yes, if everyone on the titanic had just believed a bit harder then it would have floated.
It’s not about inaction being an excuse, it’s about realising that trying to put out a house fire with a water pistol isn’t going to work - particularly if half the neighbourhood is there chucking gasoline on it.
I live responsibly, recycle, grow my own food, built my house out of traditional and local materials, plant trees, pay for other people to plant trees.
None of it is going to make the damnedest bit of difference, other than mildly soothing my conscience. If I really cared about my impact, I would kill myself. I’ve done the next best thing and had myself sterilised - no children, ever.
The world is still going to die. I’ll just be in a happier place when the food riots start.
> Yes, if everyone on the titanic had just believed a bit harder then it would have floated.
That was one of the stupidest similes I’ve heard. A more accurate one would be: if everyone just stopped hauling up buckets of water from the sea to pour them into the intact ship, we could avoid the disaster.
And this is illustrates something very important. Climate change isn’t an inevitable catastrophe out of our hands. It is a catastrophe everyone of us us creating with our individual actions every day. If each of us just stoped, there would be no catastrophe.
You are labouring under the misapprehension that we are not yet at the point of no return. We have already shot by it, and are falling through the air having driven off the cliff.
If everyone just stopped (the probability of industrialised society stopping dead in its tracks overnight is nil, and despite four decades of hand waving nothing has changed, apart from emissions inexorably increasing, and more and more chaotic systems being kicked into action), there would still be a catastrophe of immeasurable proportions.
Our time under the sun is done.
I think hope is insidious - having faith that everything will somehow be ok despite all evidence to the contrary is deeply counterproductive.
The best advice I can give anyone, and the advice I myself have acted upon, is to enjoy what remains of our short lives.
100 companies are responsible for ~70% of emissions. To argue that an ordinary person switching to reusable bags and an electric car will make a difference is (sadly) wishful thinking.
It's nice to feel in control, so I understand why you might want that story to be true -- but I'd suggest a better use of your energy would be political action. The only way this problem can be solved is through significant political action that is proportional to the climate catastrophe we are facing. Anything else is adjusting deckchairs on the Titanic.
Your analogy makes no sense by the way -- nobody was pouring buckets of water into the Titanic. The hull was breached -- there was a fundamental problem with the state of the ship. In fact, everyone getting pails and throwing water off the Titanic wouldn't have saved the ship or the people. Individual philanthropic action can't fix problems that an entire economic system has created.
I agree with most of what you have said - we need to exert political pressure by taking action. This action probably needs to be disruptive and unpleasant to work, like the actions taken by the civil rights movements of the last century.
However, I would also like to put forward the following argument for why your own efforts could make a difference:
Imagine a trolley, speeding toward a junction. On one branch is a child, tied to the rails.
You are in the plant room and can cut power to the trolley, but this will only slow it down - the trolley's momentum alone will kill the child. However, you see across the way a stranger in the signal box, surrounded by levers controlling the points in the station. They are frantically pulling levers, but so far they haven't hit on the one which diverts the trolley.
Should you cut the power to slow the trolley?
We are on the tracks - if we survive, it will be because of a political or technical breakthrough before it's too late. We don't know precisely when too late is - it could be ten years, or twenty, or ten years ago and we're buggered.
Each individual's emissions savings make too late a little later, which changes the odds of survival a little bit (or our estimate of the odds - this is probably the philosophical weak spot in the argument).
Maybe the plane trip you don't take or the car you stop driving or the product you choose not to buy is the marginal decision that gives time to avert disaster. If we do avert disaster, one of these decisions must be that marginal decision, somewhere, somewhen.
These choices are tickets in the not-extinction lottery, and it makes sense to play when you can, as much as you can.
If you have a (virtually) unlimited amount of time and energy to expend on thinking about climate change and its impacts, go for it.
My point is that you will get far more bang for your buck if you spend energy on political action. Most ordinary people don't have time to spend on HN arguing about the best way of stopping climate change, they have other things to do in their lives -- and we should be convincing them to take political action (with us) instead of wasting their limited amounts of spare energy on minor personal changes that won't have as much of an impact.
I guess if you have a limited budget to spend, I would put political action at the top of the list. However, I think typically people have several limited budgets which are kind of incommensurable.
For example for me, the decision never to fly again has not cost me any action points to spend on my involvement in political campaigns, nor has that limited my decision to work in this field for a reduced wage than I could get in adtech, or whatever.
Where efforts are not orthogonal like this I'd say go for politics first though. So we are in agreement!
> 100 companies are responsible for ~70% of emissions.
End consumers are buying and using the products of those emissions. Companies don’t create emissions out of economic isolation and a purely evil desire to ruin the planet. They do it because someone is paying them to do it.
When I buy and burn gas from Shell, I’m the one responsible for those emissions, not Shell, IMO.
Yes and no. It is definitely true that companies aren't just burning coal for the fun of it, but the primary problem is that companies have no (economic) incentive to use processes that are less environmentally damaging. In fact, given that we know for a fact that fossil fuel companies knew about global warming in the 70s and tried to hide it from the public[1] shows that they have a profit incentive to stop research into alternatives.
Getting those 100 companies to cut their emissions even down by 50% (or spend significant amounts of their massive profits on renewable energy research) would have a larger impact than any individual action you could attempt (and fail) to get the public to do.
In the end the change each and everyone can do is to stop buying products from those companies (and from companies buying products from them).
As long as everyone is blaming someone else for the problem political action is worthless. Americans says it doesn’t matter what the US does as long as China is much worse (even though US per capita is 4 times worse than China).
It’s cute how you use demeaning expressions like “it’s nice to feel in control”. If you think anyone with a brain think they are in control of climate change, then you utterly delusional. Everyone with a brain should be on the brink of panic.
And just leave the Titanic. As I said, the simile was stupid from the start.
> It’s cute how you use demeaning expressions like “it’s nice to feel in control”.
It wasn't meant to be demeaning. I earnestly believe the reason a lot of people buy into the rhetoric of personal responsibility is because the alternative (they have no control over the situation and need to trust politicians to solve the problem) is more terrifying than blaming themselves for the situation.
The bad-faith argument would've been to say that you they were peddling anti-science climate change propaganda. I didn't say it because (while it does happen to be something pushed by deniers of climate-change, in order to divert attention away from political solutions) most people who say it do honestly believe it.
But yes, the US and other first world countries need to take responsibility for the situation. I don't think getting individuals to blame themselves is helping move towards the goal of stopping this crisis.
Why should we be worried? Peat shouldn't be available to burn. It only burns when it has been disturbed by some significant environmental change (e.g. drainage/drought). Siberian peatlands should be moist/frozen through summer, but this year's heatwave has dried them out.
Peat fires in the Arctic are part of a number of positive feedback mechanisms in the climate system. They release old carbon in the form of CO2 & methane emissions, exacerbating global heating, and they leave behind a dark charred surface leading to localised heating.
Some tentative conclusions:
- at least some of these fires were ignited by lightning
- ignition made far more likely by heatwave
- fires are burning peat soils
- this is the symptom of a sick Arctic