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Climate Change

Something I pondered over lately, was whether the global lockdown has contributed to global warming. Less pollution means more sunlight can reach the earth. . It's a bit of a conundrum.
 
That effect will offset the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions...

As a result, we estimate that the direct effect of the pandemic-driven response will be negligible, with a cooling of around 0.01 ± 0.005 °C by 2030 compared to a baseline scenario that follows current national policies.
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www.nature.com

Current and future global climate impacts resulting from COVID-19 - Nature Climate Change

Reduced GHG and air pollutant emissions during the COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in declines in NOx emissions of up to 30%, causing short-term cooling, while ~20% SO2 emissions decline countered this for overall minimal temperature effect.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
Geoffers said:
Strikes me that if we are going to plant millions of trees, or abandon land to let it go wild (my preferred option) we're going to need to nationalise land. Is anyone banging the nationalise land drum? I'm reading 'Land Nationalisation - Its Necessity and Its Aims' by Alfred Russel Wallace from 1892 but that's the latest I've found!
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Either nationalise or compensate owners (but perhaps not as a tax dodge ... schedule D land, anyone ?)

by encouraging afforestation or "wilding" by some means ...
 
NoXion said:
The fucking cunts. Murderous, callous, fucking cunts.

www.bloomberg.com

Exxon’s Plan for Surging Carbon Emissions Revealed in Leaked Documents

Internal projections from one of world’s largest oil producers show an increase in its enormous contribution to global warming
www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com

We need an environmental equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials, and we needed it ten years ago.
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The Nuremberg trials happened after the defeat of nazi Germany. Sadly the likes of ExxonMobil haven't yet been defeated
 
Geoffers said:
Strikes me that if we are going to plant millions of trees, or abandon land to let it go wild (my preferred option) we're going to need to nationalise land. Is anyone banging the nationalise land drum? I'm reading 'Land Nationalisation - Its Necessity and Its Aims' by Alfred Russel Wallace from 1892 but that's the latest I've found!
Click to expand...

Don't the Queen and Charles own a fuck-tonne of UK land? If so some might argue it's already nationalised. I know Brenda's just made a mint from flogging off sea bed for turbines.
 
Geoffers said:
Strikes me that if we are going to plant millions of trees, or abandon land to let it go wild (my preferred option) we're going to need to nationalise land. Is anyone banging the nationalise land drum? I'm reading 'Land Nationalisation - Its Necessity and Its Aims' by Alfred Russel Wallace from 1892 but that's the latest I've found!
Click to expand...
You might find this thread interesting? Who owns Britain? Map displays unregistered land in England and Wales

Ian Jack · Why did we not know?: Who is hoarding the land?

Christophers estimates that since 1979 the state has sold about two million hectares – about a tenth of Britain’s landmass – which at today’s prices would be worth £400 billion, ten times the amount realised by its most valuable component, the sale of social housing. His estimate includes land qua land such as forests, artillery ranges and municipally owned farms; and land as an inherent element in other privatisations such as electricity generation and social housing. (On average – that is, for all kinds of housing – land now accounts for 70 per cent of a house’s sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent.) When Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, more land was owned by the state than ever before: 20 per cent of Britain’s total area. Today the figure is 10.5 per cent. The disposals include council houses, forests, farms, moors, royal dockyards, military airfields, railway arches, railway sidings, museums, theatres, playgrounds, parks, town halls, bowling greens, allotments, children’s centres, leisure centres, school playing fields. There has been in Christophers’s words ‘a colossal devaluation of the public estate’, and not one that came about by accident. This was a project determined and driven by the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, a project that in the forty years since its inception has never been seriously studied, let alone contested or protested, and shows no sign of letting up. In his introduction, Christophers suggests that the book’s British readers keep a puzzle at the back of their minds as they follow his disclosures: why did I not know about this before?
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StoneRoad said:
Either nationalise or compensate owners (but perhaps not as a tax dodge ... schedule D land, anyone ?)

by encouraging afforestation or "wilding" by some means ...
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It's complicated. More trees isn't neccessarily the quick fix. Scientific forestry with monocrop in straight lines isn't sustainable.

Add into that the UK is warming, so it may be better to introduce southern european trees but will they survive the winters?
 
Over-enthusiastic tree planting can be a bad thing. There was a scheme on a Cumbrian farm recently in which the new forest was capable of capturing only half as much carbon as the peat moor it replaced.:facepalm:
 
Quite right. Trees grow by themselves, and have been doing so for 450 million years. They brought this planet back from the brink five times already and will do so again. I am very pro abandonment. It is also free!

Thank you for that book review - it was fascinating and aggravating, with some choice quotes from Mark Twain and Adam Smith! I might buy the book! Nationalisation not mentioned though - I'm looking for people agitating for a national reset, where land isn't and cannot be 'owned' by anyone; like the first peoples of North America and Australia.

I read that was true to some extent in pre-invasion Britain: William the Conqueror was so broke that he promised England to his sponsors. He and they moved in, built castles and owned the land like it had never been owned before. We are still living with the consequences 1000 years later!
 
Carbon capture is very complicated ...

Wet peat bogs are far more important than many people realise.
And farmed monocultures are not good things at any time, whatever is grown in them.

I've planted a real mix of broad-leaved and coniferous trees & shrubs / hedging in and around my patch.
These are almost all native or naturalised species, mainly to support wildlife.

After a period of largely ignoring the woodland because of other demands on my time, and giving it a chance to actually grow, a couple of years ago I started to maintain it, I started by thinning out and trimming back the "hedge" areas. After stacking the results to allow some drying, this has produced some pieces large enough to use in the new stove - a lot of the thinner twigs ended up on the compost heap, as does the wood ash.
I'm hoping that these trees pruning's will become a carbon-neutral fuel source in the near future.
 
Geoffers said:
Thank you for that book review - it was fascinating and aggravating, with some choice quotes from Mark Twain and Adam Smith! I might buy the book! Nationalisation not mentioned though - I'm looking for people agitating for a national reset, where land isn't and cannot be 'owned' by anyone; like the first peoples of North America and Australia.
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The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation
Sep 14th 2019
More public resources could be managed as commons without much loss of efficiency
Geoffers said:
I read that was true to some extent in pre-invasion Britain: William the Conqueror was so broke that he promised England to his sponsors. He and they moved in, built castles and owned the land like it had never been owned before. We are still living with the consequences 1000 years later!
Click to expand...
William the Conqueror hired a lot of mercenaries as it wasn't common to have large standing armies. Henry VII invaded England four centuries later. I think William of Orange was invited?
 
Thank you. It is pay-walled but I have read a lot about commons already. We urgently need a retreat from all land that is not town or profitable farmland (i.e. not subsidised). I mean no kind of resource-extraction at all.

It is interesting that we don't even have the language for it. Say 're-wilding' to someone and they want to leap in their Land Rover with hundreds of imported saplings in plastic tubes :) Leaving nature completely alone is such an alien concept it is left with the dregs of the adjectives: 'untidy', 'unkempt' and, worst of all... 'wilderness' !!
 
Start knitting. Or digging.

Gulf Stream System at its weakest in over a millennium

02/25/2021 - Never before in over 1000 years the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as Gulf Stream System, has been as weak as in the last decades. This is the result of a new study by scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany. The researchers compiled so-called...
www.pik-potsdam.de www.pik-potsdam.de
They found consistent evidence that its slowdown in the 20th century is unprecedented in the past millennium – it is likely linked to human-caused climate change. The giant ocean circulation is relevant for weather patterns in Europe and regional sea-levels in the US ... Global warming disturbs this mechanism: Increased rainfall and enhanced melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet add fresh water to the surface ocean. This reduces the salinity and thus the density of the water, inhibiting the sinking and thus weakening the flow of the AMOC. Its weakening has also been linked to a unique substantial cooling of the northern Atlantic over the past hundred years. This so-called ‘cold blob’ was predicted by climate models as a result of a weakening AMOC, which transports less heat into this region.
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2f17c36e-62e0-49d2-93bf-8e36f82dbd50.jpeg

The northward surface flow of the AMOC leads to a deflection of water masses to the right, away from the US east coast. This is due to Earth’s rotation that diverts moving objects such as currents to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere. As the current slows down, this effect weakens and more water can pile up at the US east coast, leading to an enhanced sea level rise. In Europe, a further slowdown of the AMOC could imply more extreme weather events like a change of the winter storm track coming off the Atlantic, possibly intensifying them. Other studies found possible consequences being extreme heat waves or a decrease in summer rainfall.
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DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00699-z.
 
Solar Geoengineering Should be Investigated, Scientists Say
March 26, 2021
The most common proposal suggests spraying reflective aerosols into the atmosphere, where they would beam sunlight away from the Earth. Other proposals involve making clouds brighter by injecting them with particles, or to help trap less heat beneath them.

They're contentious ideas. Experts have many concerns about the possibility of unintended consequences, such as unwanted effects on rainfall or other global weather patterns.

Furthermore, solar geoengineering doesn't address the root cause of climate change — greenhouse gas emissions. It simply masks their warming effect on the planet. There are consequences of rising carbon dioxide levels, such as ocean acidification, that geoengineering can't address.
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So an aerosol-based toupee to try and address the problem of climate change? Sounds like the kind of half-arsed solution we'd come up with in order to desperately cling to the status quo.
 
A cloud of orbital sunshades located at the Earth-Sun L1 would seem to be a better way of reducing the planet's insolation than dumping crap into the atmosphere. More controllable. More reversible too, since I'm not sure how we can easily un-dump chemical or physical dispersant materials from the atmosphere. Sunshades wouldn't introduce novel substances into the biosphere. There'd be no need to worry about the interaction between the dispersed substances and the those comprising the atmosphere. The sunshades could be solar-powered and could be mostly made out of thin foil. Also given the total volume of the Earth's atmosphere, versus the 2-dimensional area required to shade the entire Earth at the L1 point, it might actually require less bulk material overall than the aerosol idea.

In fact atmospheric modification is looking like the worst geoengineering option of them all.
 
Saul Goodman said:
Given the chance, Elon Musk would probably have this sorted in a few weeks... or call somebody a paedo.
Click to expand...

Elon Musk is a fucking clown. He can wear a Jester's cap and foolishly dance for his idiot fanboys while the adults get on with doing their work.
 
NoXion said:
A cloud of orbital sunshades located at the Earth-Sun L1 would seem to be a better way of reducing the planet's insolation than dumping crap into the atmosphere. More controllable. More reversible too, since I'm not sure how we can easily un-dump chemical or physical dispersant materials from the atmosphere. Sunshades wouldn't introduce novel substances into the biosphere. There'd be no need to worry about the interaction between the dispersed substances and the those comprising the atmosphere. The sunshades could be solar-powered and could be mostly made out of thin foil. Also given the total volume of the Earth's atmosphere, versus the 2-dimensional area required to shade the entire Earth at the L1 point, it might actually require less bulk material overall than the aerosol idea.
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It would be a BIG undertaking.

www.pnas.org

Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1)

If it were to become apparent that dangerous changes in global climate were inevitable, despite greenhouse gas controls, active methods to cool the Earth on an emergency basis might be desirable. The concept considered here is to block 1.8% of the solar flux with a space sunshade orbited near...
www.pnas.org www.pnas.org

An ideal sunshade with the above reflectivity and density would orbit at 2.2 Gm and, for 1.8% flux reduction*, would require area 6 million km2 and would weigh ≈7 million tons (marked “screen material alone” in Fig. 2 b). A practical sunshade will be heavier when structural and control elements are included.
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*to mitigate the warming effect of a doubling of CO2 levels.

SpaceX Starship is aiming to lift 100tons to LEO, so not accounting for in-orbit refuelling flights (required to propel the payload out to L1 and return the spaceship) you'd need 70,000 launches, which is about 14x as many orbital launches so far in all of spaceflight history.

That's the sort of flight rate that Starship is being designed for, and with a goal of $10/ton marginal cost, it might not even be astronomically expensive.
But it would require a complete step-change in spaceflight operations, from rare and expensive to cheap and everyday.
 
And how much would it cost to implement this cock-eyed scheme to add further adulterants to the atmosphere we all have to breathe?
 
NoXion said:
A cloud of orbital sunshades located at the Earth-Sun L1 would seem to be a better way of reducing the planet's insolation than dumping crap into the atmosphere. More controllable. More reversible too, since I'm not sure how we can easily un-dump chemical or physical dispersant materials from the atmosphere. Sunshades wouldn't introduce novel substances into the biosphere. There'd be no need to worry about the interaction between the dispersed substances and the those comprising the atmosphere. The sunshades could be solar-powered and could be mostly made out of thin foil. Also given the total volume of the Earth's atmosphere, versus the 2-dimensional area required to shade the entire Earth at the L1 point, it might actually require less bulk material overall than the aerosol idea.

In fact atmospheric modification is looking like the worst geoengineering option of them all.
Click to expand...
Giant space parasol definitely > atmospheric chemical toupee....
 
Big Oil Is Trying to Make Climate Change Your Problem to Solve. Don’t Let Them
May 14, 2021
A new Harvard study highlights a decades-long trend — how industry creates systemic problems and then blames consumers for it
Of course, consumers aren’t entirely blameless, particularly the world’s wealthiest individuals, but the idea that oil is a purely demand-side industry is ridiculous. In the 1980s, for example, when the oil crisis was finally over (oil prices had risen by 300 percent at one point) oil companies were very worried about the fact that Americans had gotten good at saving energy, so good that demand seemed to have permanently dipped.

Did they reduce supply accordingly? No, they looked for ways to drive demand back up, tinkering with production and lobbying for policies that would incentivize increased fossil fuel use. More recently, as companies have grappled with a natural gas glut, they have not stopped fracking, but merely found a new revenue stream — plastic.
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Pickman's model said:
Missed this last year, sure it's on the thread somewhere More than half of all CO2 emissions since 1751 emitted in the last 30 years I think the executive summary is we're utterly fucked
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Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says
Mon 10 Jul 2017
Four years old but I doubt much has changed? Maybe cryptocurrency mining?
 
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