Some Disturbing Climate Trends

[Ashful]

Yes, that one thing is small, but we are talking about a death by a thousand cuts, not a quick decapitation. You also have to consider that the geographic poles have shifted a relatively large amount in the last few decades. Like how the climate is always in flux, but we are pushing it even harder.

Not arguing, just playing math, but I'd guess there's a 1 in 4 chance we're "pushing it even harder". There's a 2 in 4 chance the direction we're pushing it is perpendicular to other shift factors, and thus no impact. There's also a 1 in 4 chance we're pushing it in a direction that actually compensates for other factors, and thus beneficial in maintaining prior positioning.

 

[SpaceBus]

It may even be that the geographic pole movement is a symptom of climate change rather than a significant forcing. A few terms back I was taking a class on climate change and it is theorized that shifts in orbit relative to the sun can cause large climate shifts, like the one that lead to a warming planet and dinosaurs becoming the dominant a animals. Perhaps the ice ages are caused by these shifts in orbit. It is theorized that the weight distribution of liquid water vs ice has a big effect on orbital stability. Currently water is being pumped out of the ground and the ice is melting, theoretically the recipe for an orbital shift caused by changes in weight distribution/spin.

Maybe the pole shifting a few meters doesn't matter, but the spin instability causing the shift is the actual problem. Maybe both things together are a feedback loop.

 

[tlc1976]

I remember reading that the recent big earthquake in Chile shifted the earth’s axis a bit too. A lot of things probably do.

If pumping of groundwater changes things, then I think it would be just as likely that massive rains or droughts could shift enough water around to change things too.

 

[SpaceBus]

I remember reading that the recent big earthquake in Chile shifted the earth’s axis a bit too. A lot of things probably do.

If pumping of groundwater changes things, then I think it would be just as likely that massive rains or droughts could shift enough water around to change things too.

It would take 6,000 years of rainfall to replenish the nearly depleted Midwest aquifer. The amount of water pumped out of the ground vastly exceeds rainfall. Particular in areas where the water is being pumped out the fastest.

 

[begreen]

The Aral Sea was formerly the fourth-largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 sq km. It's now less than 3,000 sq km.
The cumulative effect of these displacements may not seem like a lot, but they add up and do affect the earth. The pole right now is moving at 4.36 cm a year which adds up over the decades and affects the tilt of the earth. This is not as much as the big seasonal shifts that occur, but they can make a difference. And when the water runs out, even bigger changes occur in civilizations

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL103509.

 

[SpaceBus]

I suspect removing groundwater also has cascade effects on the water cycle as well. Less groundwater probably results in less rain. Colonists believed that rain followed the plow, but the opposite was true

 

[begreen]

Overall, we are not making progress fast enough. The point of no return appears to be nigh.

World hits record land, sea temperatures as climate change fuels 2023 extremes

The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.

www.reuters.com

 

[woodgeek]

Overall, we are not making progress fast enough. The point of no return appears to be nigh.

World hits record land, sea temperatures as climate change fuels 2023 extremes

The target of keeping long-term global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is moving out of reach, climate experts say, with nations failing to set more ambitious goals despite months of record-breaking heat on land and sea.

www.reuters.com

Could you define 'the point of no return'... positive feedback to a climate state that is unlivable for humans or animals?

 

[begreen]

Could you define 'the point of no return'... positive feedback to a climate state that is unlivable for humans or animals?

The article did not dive into that subject specifically. I think in general terms they were referring to an irreversible systemic momentum. The consequences were not discussed. The gulf between the unlivable and really miserable may be large. Perhaps the author was relying on a prior article on the topic to explain further:

Explainer: How close are we to passing 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming?

Since the last Ice Age ended nearly 12,000 years ago and human civilisations developed, the Earth's long-term average global air temperature has never varied by more than 1.5 degrees above a stable 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit), scientists say.

www.reuters.com

What is disquieting is that civilization does not appear to be creeping up slowly on this target.

 

[joop]

we'll evolve to meet whatever comes or go extinct.thats life

 

[Ashful]

we'll evolve to meet whatever comes or go extinct.

Truer words have never been spoken, but I'm not all that fond of either thought.

 

[woodgeek]

The article did not dive into that subject specifically. I think in general terms they were referring to an irreversible systemic momentum. The consequences were not discussed. The gulf between the unlivable and really miserable may be large.

I don't believe there is much 'momentum' in the climate system. Things like forests lag by years, and glaciers by a decade... but these are perturbations... the climate largely follows the current forcing.

I was reflecting on how I wanted to respond, and @joop pithily summarized my thoughts.

If I want to say something is bad or good, or scary or not scary, or really anything, I have to say 'compared to what?' I need a point of reference.

If my reference is 1950, then the (climate) future will be: bad, Bad, BAD!

If my reference is 2010, then the (climate) future will be pretty sucky.

But my reference is actually the projected climate of 2100, as viewed in 2000, or 2010, or even 2015.

Recall the time, not very long ago that the Oil (and Coal) companies were telling us TINA: there is no alternative. They projected fossil fuel GROWTH monotonically through 2100 (not to mention making liquid fuels out of coal when the oil gets too scarce)! And THAT was called 'Business as Usual', or BAU.

While scientists were telling us that BAU bakes in a +5°C or higher world in 2100. A world with no polar ice, with rapidly rising oceans, collapsing ice sheets, no surviving forests outside boreal regions, all coral reefs and tropical forests gone, swaths of land where humans cannot survive without AC (dewpoint>95°F), mass extinction due to habitat destruction, etc.

And the fossil fuel guys and their bought politicians and lawyers and ad campaigns said 'Naw, that won't happen!' Remember TINA! Just keep paying us.

Those predictions were NOT hyperbole. An all fossil 21st century WOULD give us a world destroying +5°C trajectory. The habitat destruction and extinctions and ocean rise are irreversible, resulting in a permanently poorer, flooded and broken world.

That is what Mr. Gore was going on about... that our stated public policy was INSANE. And he was not wrong.

So, how did that all work out? We are now projected to come in around 2°C rise by 2100. And the climate of 2020 is already a +1°C rise.

So, we need to adapt to another +1 °C rise over the next 30-50 years, rather than +4 °C rise over the next 80 years.

Still sucks. There will be fires and floods and smoke and extinctions and killer storms and habitat loss and loss of many human lives.

But with the proper reference frame, its a piece of cake. A +2°C world will be recognizable to us. Degraded, for sure, but recognizable. A +5°C world would be a slaughterhouse.

And is not going to happen! And Al Gore will (wrongly) be seen by history as wrong. And alarmist.

And if you believe the current techno-optimists... we might come in around +1.6-1.7 °C. What a difference a couple decades makes.

 

[begreen]

While living conditions are on track to go from bad to worse, I think lack of water and heat will be the major disrupters. Large-scale crop failures will bring about famine and migrations. The haves will become increasingly isolated from the have-nots. This is not what leads to stable societies. Lack of rain is what started the still ongoing Syrian civil war. Between 2006 and 2010, Syria experienced the worst drought in the country’s modern history. Hundreds of thousands of farming families were reduced to poverty, causing a mass migration of rural people to urban shantytowns. This is where the unrest started.

 

[woodgeek]

While living conditions are on track to go from bad to worse, I think lack of water and heat will be the major disrupters. Large-scale crop failures will bring about famine and migrations. The haves will become increasingly isolated from the have-nots. This is not what leads to stable societies. Lack of rain is what started the still ongoing Syrian civil war. Between 2006 and 2010, Syria experienced the worst drought in the country’s modern history. Hundreds of thousands of farming families were reduced to poverty, causing a mass migration of rural people to urban shantytowns. This is where the unrest started.

And there will no doubt be more Syrias and megadroughts and forest clearing fires over the next 50 years.

I am skeptical that there will be mass famine. Obesity will continue to kill more people than famine going forward, as it does today.

On average, the world will keep getting wealthier in a way that defies common sense.

I think getting rid of fossils, and then a stabilizing population will bend the CO2 curve, and give us an inflection point on climate change well before 2100. I hope to live to see it.

But getting to an actual stable climate will be hard. There are plenty of entrenched CO2 and methane sources, which run up hard against cultural anchors. China will lead on renewables, but keep burning coal as a jobs program for poor rural areas. The West will electrify (almost) everything, but some places like Alberta and New England and Germany and Russia will bring up the rear on the energy transition, for a variety of reasons including climate and politics and built environment. Lots of folks will keep eating meat and dairy. And if they start to eat less... producers will export the rest to folks that currently don't (see the Tobacco case).

And I am sure there are plenty of other stickier cases.

 

[joop]

once the perma frost thaws it won't matter what you do.suntanning in january aaaahhhh

 

[Ashful]

Lots of folks will keep eating meat and dairy. And if they start to eat less... producers will export the rest to folks that currently don't (see the Tobacco case).

I do wish more attention and energy were directed toward methods of reducing the environmental impact of livestock, rather than preaching that we reduce or eliminate meat and dairy from our diets. I don't know when the first egg or chicken were consumed, but I'd guess these two have been with us longer than most of our food crops, and they both certainly taste a heck of a lot better while providing proteins not as easily consumed on a wholly-vegetarian diet.

 

[woodgeek]

I do wish more attention and energy were directed toward methods of reducing the environmental impact of livestock, rather than preaching that we reduce or eliminate meat and dairy from our diets.

Not to go down the rabbit hole here...

LOTS of energy has gone into methods of reducing the environmental impact of livestock... bc efforts to reduce the cost of production (optimize volume/cost of feed, rate of growth) usually ALSO reduce the environmental cost as well. The result is the so-called factory farm, CAFOs and feeding cattle on grains and soy and alfalfa raised on synthetic Haber-Bosch fertilizer, fattening them up FAST and killing them young.

The result is that such beef is a fraction of the CO2 and CH4 of pasture raised beef, per pound, and uses a fraction of the land area overall.

Folks like to point out that beef can be raised on range that is not suitable for intensive crop production but that is, honestly, irrelevant. Basically all the available range land like that on earth is already being grazed... and yields a very small fraction of the beef on the market. This land use is often a self-fulfilling prophecy... the land is poor and suitable only for grazing bc it has been historically damaged by grazing. Closer examination suggests that NOT grazing such land with cattle, and switching them to native ruminants would remediate the land to being more productive and stable grassland or even forests. Example: England and Wales used to be nearly all forest (think Robin Hood and Ivanhoe) and now its nearly all this lawn-like pastureland grazed by sheep... and folks accept that as the 'natural state' of England.

Anyway, we live in overshoot world, a world making 6X more biomass per year than before humans came along. Not possible without synthetic fertilizer and Green Revolution crops. And beef is ALSO in overshoot, with current production similarly being 6X what could be raised on a pasture or by 'natural' grazing by ruminants. The much touted 'regenerative grazing' efforts have been shown to massively increase CH4 emissions and land and external resource use (like chicken feed). Land is regenerated and sinks carbon for a few years, and then saturates and the operation becomes a net CO2 emitter again

The main way to make beef (and dairy) greener would be to enclose the feedlot operations and capture the remaining methane. But there is no economic or regulatory mandate to do so. This would also likely require some expensive HVAC, since right now these operations are necessarily well ventilated.

So there are three things... we would like our meat to be cheap, to be green (easy on the environment) and humane (with animals raised in a natural environment). The first two are totally aligned (except for subsidies and not capturing methane), but also totally antithetical to the third one.

 

[woodgeek]

I don't know when the first egg or chicken were consumed, but I'd guess these two have been with us longer than most of our food crops, and they both certainly taste a heck of a lot better while providing proteins not as easily consumed on a wholly-vegetarian diet.

The beef and chicken we eat nowadays bear little resemblance to the chicken and beef of the past even 100 years ago, with chickens increasing in weight by almost 5X.

Chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950s

What breeding can do, in one glorious picture.

www.vox.com

Similarly, beef has been bred to have much higher intramuscular fat content than they had even 40 years ago.

When we eat chicken wings or a steak, both foods are much higher in fat, than when folks ate the same foods 50 years ago.

Its a head-game. Most of us know that food producers making Dorito's have engineered them, and other 'highly processed' foods to be what the pros call 'hyper-palatable' (aka addictive) via combination of fat and salt. And we know that such 'junk food' is bad for us and to be eaten in moderation.

Most Food in America is Hyper-Palatable and 'Difficult to Stop Eating'

'Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food' an author of the study told Newsweek.

www.newsweek.com

But the fact is that beef and chicken have ALSO been engineered to be much higher in fat than before. And most commercial chicken is injected with salt water, to both boost the weight and to render it ALSO hyperpalatable. The amount of fat (and added salt) per calorie in modern beef and chicken has in the last few years approached that of Doritos and junk food, just as consumption of both has risen.

People like to think of chicken and beef as 'whole foods', unprocessed and natural, traditional foods that have been eaten as long as there have been humans, and so obviously healthy and right.

But that is not what is being sold at McDonalds or in the supermarket in 2023.

 

[Ashful]

All good points, woodgeek. Yes, I already knew most of it, particularly with how selective breeding, feed, artificial lighting cycles, and hormones have all lead to faster growth and larger birds, sometimes to the point they are immobilized by their own size and growth. I was under the impression this is more dramatic with regard to poultry than beef, but that issue with regard to either is another rabbit hole, to use your term.

But one thing worth noting is that there has been a shift from beef to chicken progressing continuously since the 1940's, and surpassed beef back in the 1990's. When you talk about enclosing an operation and collecting the greenhouse gasses, it would seem this should be very doable with poultry farms, as at least around here most are already completely indoors. Of course that still leaves beef and pork, although I'd think even pork could be done indoors with minimal impact to the animals, as they're not grazing.

Moreover, I think that doing a better job of addressing food waste could be prioritized first, before any discussion of changing one's diet for environmental reasons. According to https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/, the world is wasting 2.5 billion tons of food each year, with America leading on that front. They equate that waste in America alone to "130 billion meals", which with 330 million people in this country, is more than one full meal per day per person. With more awareness, education, and support in this area, it's possible that reductions in environmental (and economic, and underserved populations) impact could be made without changing one's diet. A restaurant or cruise ship who advertises based on their own fight against food waste might become as trendy as the "garden to tables" have become over the last ten years.

 

[woodgeek]

But one thing worth noting is that there has been a shift from beef to chicken progressing continuously since the 1940's, and surpassed beef back in the 1990's. When you talk about enclosing an operation and collecting the greenhouse gasses, it would seem this should be very doable with poultry farms, as at least around here most are already completely indoors. Of course that still leaves beef and pork, although I'd think even pork could be done indoors with minimal impact to the animals, as they're not grazing.

Moreover, I think that doing a better job of addressing food waste could be prioritized first, before any discussion of changing one's diet for environmental reasons. According to https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/, the world is wasting 2.5 billion tons of food each year, with America leading on that front. They equate that waste in America alone to "130 billion meals", which with 330 million people in this country, is more than one full meal per day per person. With more awareness, education, and support in this area, it's possible that reductions in environmental (and economic, and underserved populations) impact could be made without changing one's diet. A restaurant or cruise ship who advertises based on their own fight against food waste might become as trendy as the "garden to tables" have become over the last ten years.

The main issue is methane, and there beef really stands alone. Pork and chickens don't make much methane, so no need to enclose them. I assume they are confined bc it makes them fatten up faster? I think chicken farms produce a lot of ammonia, but the atmosphere scrubs that out pretty fast. While a grain based diet does reduce beef CH4 production a lot (IIRC >60%), it would probably be cheaper to engineer the animal and its microbiome to produce nearly zero CH4 on a grain diet than to capture the CH4 mechanically.

Cows Genetically Modified to Burp and Fart Less Could Cut Methane Emissions

Scientists have identified genetically inherited gut microbes that regulate how much methane a cow produces.

www.newsweek.com

I think there are many opportunities in reducing food waste. Products with short shelf lives are always going to generate some waste. And I learned long ago that many sewage treatment plants rely on food 'waste' being put down kitchen disposal systems. The bacteria that make the plant work rely on those calories and nutrients. If everyone composted every scrap of their waste, we would need to throw 'food' into the treatment plants to make them go.

 

[woodgeek]

The USDA Prime designation, with its higher price, is largely a measure of marbling and fat content after trimming. This has driven changes to feeding practices, and selective breeding of animals (e.g. Angus) to yield a much higher fraction of Prime-designated beef. They ultrasound the calves to assess how marbled they are.

 

[71montess]

He fellas how about this, but let's not get political;

 

[woodgeek]

Link here: https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/07/03/states-suing-epa-residential-wood-burning-stoves

I think we all appreciate that it is a complex problem, and what needs to be done is different in different regions.

It seems to me that EPA improvements and mandates over the last 20+ years have been very sensible and affordable, while still making genuine improvements to emissions while maintaining safety.

Given the EPA's mission, they usually limit themselves to improvements that are cost effective, trying to balance cost of ownership with benefits to society.

That said, I think wood burning is waaay down the list of things EPA cares about, because of how little wood burning there is, and how it is mostly located in low pop density areas.

If we take the current EPA regs as a reasonable state of the art for the tech that can be achieved at a reasonable price, it is not clear that it is sufficient for urban/dense locations with a high proportion of wood burners. And that those areas will continue to have air quality issues. The solution for THAT is for the local authority (like state of Alaska or Mass) to provide incentives, rebates and regulations to reduce the amount of wood burning in those areas. Period.

The 10 states bringing the case can put in their own programs to swap out out equipment, or to get people to switch away from wood burning. That is not the EPAs job or within their tiny budget... and they are being scapegoated here IMO.

But then, I think MA politics is a mess, so I want to blame everything on them, and Bill Gates.

 

[71montess]

Yes Massachusetts will take your wood stoves if needed. But from my cold dead hands ! 😂

 

[sloeffle]

The USDA Prime designation, with its higher price, is largely a measure of marbling and fat content after trimming. This has driven changes to feeding practices, and selective breeding of animals (e.g. Angus) to yield a much higher fraction of Prime-designated beef. They ultrasound the calves to assess how marbled they are.

You beat me to it. Farmers are paid on a grid, they get more money per animal when they grade out as prime vs choice on the rail. This is driven by customer demand for prime beef. Any beef animal can grade out as prime too, just not Angus. CAB is a bunch of marketing BS.

https://animalscience.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2012/04/beef-grid-pricing-cattle.pdf

I’m not so sure I agree with your chicken is fattier comment. All of the lean chickens must get sent to Ohio. 😂

https://www.mensjournal.com/food-drink/leanest-meat-proteins-ranked#gid=ci02b8d1a840092491&pid=2-chicken-breast-skinless-boneless