[Tanada]

Tanada,

I completely understand your “willies.”

Somewhere a long while ago I read that some of the geoengineering strategies are within the means of super rich individuals. The threat being that some one of them could take action in their own with bad results. Worse, that 2 or more entities could take uncoordinated action really screwing the pooch.

I’ve long come to the conclusion that we will end up geoengineering, it’s inevitable. It’s also likely we will screw it up big time.

Indeed, I saw it suggested a few years back that all jet passenger aircraft should be required to have two sets of fuel. Clean type for liftoff and landing but with a very sulfur rich fuel for use at their cruising altitude. The idea being the sulfur dioxide at the top of the troposphere would act like a reflective layer as the tiny droplets of sulfuric acid attracted water to themselves forming a very thin persistent misty layer. The problem is of course any nation or even uber wealthy individual could do this. Just from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo back in the 1990's we know how much sulfur it takes to drop global temperatures over 1 degree C and how long that sulfur stays in the air before it comes down as acid rain. The problem is naturally enough multifold, one you are causing dilute acid rain to fall everywhere. Two you are giving people the idea that CO2 emissions don't mater because you are "compensating". Three when the next volcano does a Pinatubo suddenly the effect is vastly boosted by nature and you are stuck with it being too cold for your crops that need the solar energy being reflected away by the sulfur. I could go on but I think you get my drift.

All of the proposed solutions have one thing in common, if people believe we have a tech solution then they shrug off GW and assume technology will fix it. That totally ignores side issues like ocean acidification which is caused by high CO2 and would be made worse by artificial sulfur dioxide releases in the upper atmosphere causing acid rain.

[GHung]

Tanada,

I completely understand your “willies.”

Somewhere a long while ago I read that some of the geoengineering strategies are within the means of super rich individuals. The threat being that some one of them could take action in their own with bad results. Worse, that 2 or more entities could take uncoordinated action really screwing the pooch.

I’ve long come to the conclusion that we will end up geoengineering, it’s inevitable. It’s also likely we will screw it up big time.

Indeed, I saw it suggested a few years back that all jet passenger aircraft should be required to have two sets of fuel. Clean type for liftoff and landing but with a very sulfur rich fuel for use at their cruising altitude. The idea being the sulfur dioxide at the top of the troposphere would act like a reflective layer as the tiny droplets of sulfuric acid attracted water to themselves forming a very thin persistent misty layer. The problem is of course any nation or even uber wealthy individual could do this. Just from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo back in the 1990's we know how much sulfur it takes to drop global temperatures over 1 degree C and how long that sulfur stays in the air before it comes down as acid rain. The problem is naturally enough multifold, one you are causing dilute acid rain to fall everywhere. Two you are giving people the idea that CO2 emissions don't mater because you are "compensating". Three when the next volcano does a Pinatubo suddenly the effect is vastly boosted by nature and you are stuck with it being too cold for your crops that need the solar energy being reflected away by the sulfur. I could go on but I think you get my drift.

All of the proposed solutions have one thing in common, if people believe we have a tech solution then they shrug off GW and assume technology will fix it. That totally ignores side issues like ocean acidification which is caused by high CO2 and would be made worse by artificial sulfur dioxide releases in the upper atmosphere causing acid rain.

I figured out some time back that it's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. The only workable option, IMO, is to reduce consumption of pretty much everything (AKA: greatly reduced human population), particularly 'virgin' resources. I also deduced that this will likely be forced by circumstances rather than voluntary or legislated.
Then, again, maybe we can try throwing some virgins into volcanoes.

[Newfie]

GHung....100% agree. Seems sooo obvious.

[Plantagenet]

The idea behind so-called Green GeoEngineering is to plant millions of trees, which will soak up CO2 as they grow.

But now we can see that won't work.

No one anticipated the magnitude of the forest fires that would be produced by global heating. The fires we are now seeing in Brazil and in the Congo and Angola and in Siberia and Alaska and elsewhere are burning millions of trees, and releasing their CO2 into the atmosphere. The same thing would happen if more trees were planted in a Green GeoEngineering campaign. The hotter and dryer it gets, the more forest fires (and more carbon release from burning forests) we are going to see.

Global Forests can no longer be considered a carbon sink........when the forests burn they become massive carbon sources.

Cheers!

[asg70]

The only workable option, IMO, is to reduce consumption of pretty much everything

Hear that Plant? LESS...FLYING...

Otherwise, STFU about climate change.

[GHung]

GHung....100% agree. Seems sooo obvious.

Which part? The virgins?

[Newfie]

ASG,

Knock off the personal attacks.

You can make intelligent posts but your effectiveness is degraded when you resort to these 4th grade comments.

Keep your hands to yourself, don’t make me turn around.

[Newfie]

GHung....100% agree. Seems sooo obvious.

Which part? The virgins?

Especially the virgins. I have the volcano franchise so just bring em by and drop ‘me off.

(Oh dang, now they will take me off suicide watch!)

[Plantagenet]

ASG..... can make intelligent posts

Please alert me when one finally appears.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Now don’t you start!

[Plantagenet]

I'd just like to see one again, thats all.

The ratio of intelligent posts to ad hom attack posts is very low for that particular member, and honestly I haven't seen an intelligent or informative post from that direction in quite a while. If it should ever happen again I don't want to miss it. There used to be a "hall of fame" on the main page for especially good posts here at this site, and if it ever happens again perhaps it could be posted prominently there for all to enjoy the rare event.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Plant,

Don’t even try to talk your way outta it. No personal attacks.

Don’t be the second hand clapping.

[asg70]

I'm not the only one who has called Plant out on his cognitive dissonance. IMHO, it deserves to be called out anytime he climbs back up on his environmental high-horse and starts pointing fingers this way and that. I reject the hypothesis that I'm making simple ad hominem attacks. It cuts to the heart of whatever political argument he's trying to make on the basis of "do as I say...not as I do".

[Newfie]

ASG,

In case you haven’t noticed I’m in no mood to argue.

Both you and Plant cease this personal fight. Trade emails and call each other all the names you want.

Future posts of this nature will be deleted.

[Whitefang]

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/897

A synthetic history of human land use
Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts). Hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists transformed the face of Earth earlier and to a greater extent than has been widely appreciated, a transformation that was essentially global by 3000 years before the present.

Abstract
Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 years before the present (yr B.P.) to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by 3000 years ago, considerably earlier than the dates in the land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by more than 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked for 2000 yr B.P. and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth’s transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.

Our fall from grace, taking more than we needed millennia ago

Maybe we made our climate stable for a while, preventing a new cold snap to a true ice age, 2 degrees Celcius cooler.
Maybe something made us self domesticated, a new way of thinking, our brains actually shrunk 10 % or so.
Maybe we homo sapiens lost more than we gained, the feeling of knowing what is what, to grasp this world with our minds.
Maybe we lost a magical world with beings like the hunter gatherers painted on the walls of caves.
Everybody knows about an internal struggle, the faint echo of a war we lost ages ago.
And now this thing is taking down complex life as we know it.

[dohboi]

"Maybe we made our climate stable for a while, preventing a new cold snap to a true ice age, 2 degrees Celcius cooler."

As Hansen pointed out, if this were the goal, it would only require a few dozen plants producing one of the more powerful greenhouse gasses, like fluorinated gasses, to achieve it.

Instead we have blown way, way past that goal (which probably was unnecessary anyway for at least a few hundred more years) and dumped so much CO2 and methane into the atmosphere that we have kicked off feedbacks that will knock us right out of the cycle of glaciation that have characterized the planet for many millions of years.

[Whitefang]

we have kicked off feedbacks that will knock us right out of the cycle of glaciation that have characterized the planet for many millions of years.

Without the abundance of complex organic life, it will very likely be lonely, how much fun are bacteria and the like?
Only for 5 to 10 million years though, so no worry, everything will be allrighty then
Not certain we, Earth I mean will have ice again, a hothouse is the more stable position and could well last until the very end as the sun becomes what, a supernova?

Will the spirit shed a tear? No more life stories from most of organic life as we know it.
If there is a miracle worker, a messiah, he or she should make a move and start working, I bet this magical being is still waiting for a last panic mode to settle in. If indeed we are all magical beings the awareness of our doom, our pending death should give us the sobriety to look out for the spirit, to let go, to break this perception and spread our wings into the unknown.
How did Blake said it? Cleanse our glasses to percieve things as are, infinite?

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes ... liam_Blake

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

He knew we are living a description, maybe he knew about our other life as as well, our total being.

[clif]

Not certain we, Earth I mean will have ice again, a hothouse is the more stable position and could well last until the very end as the sun becomes what, a supernova?

The sun will not go "supernova" as you put it. Simply it is not large enough, IE enough mass to get to the needed levels of fusion to create enough layers of fusion of different atomic structures to do so.

At the current time the sun is primarily only fusing hydrogen into helium. The most basic level of fusion possible. When most of the core of the sun has been fused into helium fusion will temporarily stop. The gravity of the sun's mass will cause it to contract, until the heat generated by said contraction causes the now helium core of the sun to begin fusing into carbon atoms. A layer outside this fusion cycle which will still be primarily hydrogen atoms will contain enough pressure and temperature to begin a hydrogen fusion cycle. These two fusion cycles will create enough energy to resist gravity as such and will cause the sun to expand to a red giant size, somewhere between the Venus-Earth orbit to possibly as large as Mars orbit. Time frame for this process is about 3.5 billion years. After the Helium fused into Carbon fusion cycle depletes the vast majority of helium in the core of the sun, another cessation of fusion, and resultant shrinkage of the size of the sun due to gravity will also occur. At the same time as the fusion of three helium atoms into carbon, sometimes a carbon atom and helium atom will fuse into an oxygen atom, since the energy levels for this to happen are near the same as a triple helium into single carbon atom fusion process requires.


This is as far as the mass of the sun will allow the fusion cycle to proceed, because it doesn't contain enough mass once this cycle stops the sun will cool, gravity takes over again, the center of the sun will heat up but not far enough for any more fusion to proceed and the sun will begin to cool. It has essentially become a white dwarf, and when a long enough time period has happened the sun will become what is known as a black dwarf.

Some much more massive stars move up the periodic table to the level of fusing oxygen into silicon, and the final fusion process possible the fusing of silicon into iron. This is where all star fusion stops because iron takes more energy to fuse than is given off in the process, thus slowly cooling the interior of the star in said process. (that cooling is relative) Stars that reach this point can no longer hold themselves together and the interior collapse into a black hole while the outside shells are ejected in what we call a super nova explosion.

However the limit for life on earth is shorter than the scenario of hydrogen fusion might have one believe,

For an explanation of that this link explains it very well;

http://astro.hopkinsschools.org/course_ ... h_dies.htm

[EnergyUnlimited]

@clif,
Your stellar evolution post is largrly correct, but once iron and even a tiny bit more stable Nickel-62 is formed the star will not simply cool down.
Gravity will compress it to the point when entirely new thermonuclear reactions take place resulting in rather powerful explosion.
This is usually resulting in production of large quantity of heavy elements and a neutron star "remnant".
Neutron star or at least its interiors can be vieved as a large atomic nuclei, but it is a bit of oversimplification.

Black hole on rare occassions can also be formed out of particularly heavy stars. There can be an intermediate quark star state between these two and candiidate objects are identified by astronomers.
Quark star could be vieved as a large hadron (again oversimplification, but still).
Quark star could reignite as an electroweak star. If so then it could produce substantial output of energy for millions of years and lose mass to evade BH formation. Heavier quark/electroweak stars would succumb though, due to lack of ability to get rid of excess of mass timely enough.
The faster stellar remnant rotates the more likely it will evade collapse into BH at least for some time, until rotation slows down.
Black hole is formed at the point when density of matter in neutron or quark star attains a level where speed of sound equals speed of light (speed of sound grows with density of medium and at certain huge density will equal with speed of light). Initially a tiny "seed" BH would form in a centre and then "eat" an entire stellar core.
It is believed that 2-3 solar masses of a stellar remnant are needed for this to happen.

There is also another intersting issue during BH formation, the process of conversion of fermionic matter to bosonic matter (boson particles in opposition to fermions can have all quantum numbers equal and they can occupy exactly the same space in the same time).
Examples of bosons are photon, W & B-bosons or Higgs.
But during BH formation yet another bosons must be formed and we have no idea at all, what these might be.

[asg70]

The way things are going I would expect Peakoil.com to still be debating ETP when the sun meets its fate.