Carbon capture and geoengineering
In a previous post, I made the point that even if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions ceased tomorrow, the half-lives of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, together with climate change-driven gas emissions from melting permafrost and methane clathrates doom us to decades more of warming. The only ways to avert this are (1) carbon capture to actively remove gases from the air and/or (2) geoengineering on a planetary scale.
It has been suggested that we plant more trees, since trees can sequester carbon from the atmosphere. The problems with that idea are:
• the consequences of global warming are coastal flooding, desertification and loss of fresh water; where would all those trees go?
• the world’s remaining forests are already being lost to agriculture, and that will only accelerate as arable land is lost to coastal flooding and desertification.
Ocean phytoplankton are responsible for ca. 70% of Earth’s oxygen production by exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen. Thus, like trees, phytoplankton are a form of carbon capture, and when the plankton die (or the animals the feed on them die), much of that carbon sinks to the bottom of the oceans.
In the pelagic ocean, nutrients limit phytoplankton growth. One of these nutrients is iron. It has been proposed to fertilize the world’s oceans with iron to promote phytoplankton growth leading to global natural carbon capture. The experiments to date are at best equivocal as to how effective this would be, and there are concerns that phytoplankton blooms would aversely affect coastal underwater plant life by blocking sunlight, water acidification and oxygen balance.
Is phytoplankton an important key to reversing atmospheric carbon and abating global warming? More research is desperately needed, and soon, to determine if this relatively low-tech measure can avert disaster for humanity. Are there risks? Sure, but there are great risks in doing nothing.
Geoengineering: Ocean Iron Fertilization
One thing you can do is support Climeworks AG, out of Zurich. I do.
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According to the SBTi standard, a credible, science-based net-zero strategy must combine both emissions reductions and the active removal of unavoidable CO₂ emissions. Our direct air capture and storage (DAC+S) technology removes unavoidable and historic CO₂ from the air on your behalf. …
The Climeworks process uses abundant geothermally-generated electricity in Iceland to turn CO2 into rock, which is then buried in mineshafts. Otherwise that electricity would be going towards cryptocurrency mining,
(Well, sort of like that anyway.)
Climeworks: Our CO₂ storage partner, Carbfix in Iceland, can turn CO₂ into stone in less than two years. They dissolve the CO₂ in water – sparkling water of sorts – and inject it underground where it reacts with basalt rock to form solid carbonate minerals via natural processes. …
How does underground mineralization of CO₂ work?
Eric
a couple of things i don’t understand here. be glad if you or your friend (google, i am told) could fill in some details: does half life mean that half of CO2 in atmosphere would be eliminated in 120 years? or what? is this an estimate based on known sources and known sinks… or at least rate of increase?
meanwhile, we don’t need to eliminate 50% of CO2…ten percent would be a great start. i suspect there is better information on all this. google does not usually work forme. it is full of fraud and misinformation.
The concept of half-life applies to methane oxydation into CO2, because that is a process with a Poisson time distribution. But it does not apply to reduction of CO2 concentration; because that process depends on several independent processes, such as availability of newly exposed silicate rock for weathering, and on ocean layer turnover (and saturation) for solution of atmospheric CO2.
rick shapiro
sounds like you know more than i do…but we seem to be on the same track. i did not notice methane oxidation in the description of the problem in either the main post here or the comments. half-life just showed up out of the blue…so to speak.
[and i did not thnk oxidation into CO2 was what matter in the case of methane as a greenhouse gas. the methane molecule itself is an absorber of heat (?) just like water (also a greenhouse gas though not one that matters (?) in the context of the current climate problem…at least not in the way the climate skeptics point to it as proving CO2 is not a problem.]
or,
we could ship our lltium batteries to iceland for recharging.
Well, I don’t know enough about industrial carbon capture to know how practical it would be or if it would work at all.
meanwhile, it seems to me there are places not on the seacost where reforestation is possible/
i think it would be a bad idea to “fertilize the ocean with iron.” we do not know enough about it’s effects on sea life or other unintended consequences. why replace the risk we know with risks we don’t know?”
the “fact” that if we stop adding CO2 to atmosphere now we will still have current levels (or higher) for years to come is not a very good reason to not stop adding CO2 andmaking the problem worse.
waiting for Big Science to save us, or make things worse than we can imagine, is not wise or even smart while there is much we can do by modifying our own behavior…as a species…to reduce CO2 emissions.
i do think “phytoplankton” might help. don’t know enought to say for sure.
Just curious what processes count in assessing CO2 half-life equal 120 years? Is it base-lined from some known period including biological activity, or are these inorganic processes that stay pretty constant and the biological activity moves it faster (or slower, if clear-cutting, etc.)?
In view of the enormous changes that will be occurring to move to new energy sources, 120 years sounds not too bad to work with. Twenty years would be better, but 120 still is short enough to observe some recovery as emissions decline. Of course, this system is really complicated and for sure has plenty of surprises waiting for us.
@ Eric,
Google is your friend. I found this link within ten seconds.
http://maecourses.ucsd.edu/MAE119/WI_2018/ewExternalFiles/Carbon%20Budget%20Homework%20from%20Ft%20Bend.pdf
As for 120 years, we don’t have 120 years. In 50 years, tens of millions of humans will be starving and dying for want of food and fresh water. Many of them will have weapons and, thanks to the intertubes, they will know what the rest of humanity has and where to get it. That’s what I mean by “resource wars.”
50 years? That may be a bit generous
India/Pakistan were shooting at each other over water last week
Funny, isn’t it…all the resource wars we’ve had over the control of oil for the last hundred years or more. Now we are going to have resources wars over what’s left after the damage we have caused with it.
An other one of those things I’ve harped on a lot down through the years, water is the oil of the twenty-first century. Wars will be fought, blood spilt …
Well I didn’t say we had 120 years, but a 120 year half-life is short enough to get a decent response from steps taken over the next 50 years. You do a lot of stuff for 50 years and whoever is around then says “yeah, things are improving”. If the half-life were 5000, then people say “wow, why did we waste so much effort on EVs and wind turbines?”.
Eric
can you try to explain to me what “half life” in this context comes from, and why it matters for CO2 reduction?
are you saying that if we stopped adding human generated CO2 to the atomsphere the existing natural balance of sinks and emissions would take 120 years to remove half of the excess driving climate change? and then another 120 years to remove half of the rest and so on. I may not understand half-life as well as i thought i did, but just now i can’t see why this is a half-life process.
Eric
or whoever
does it take 120 years for half the CO2 in the air to be removed. or 120 years for half the “excess” CO2 to be removed. makes a difference. the first choice is clearly absurd…. we need some clarity here.
Eric
I looked at your friend google. It would take me longer than a few seconds to see if the logic holds up. i think i see some unaccounted for assumptions. Still, it might be a fun place to start thinking about it.
@Ten,
Yes. And the confrontation of Iran and Afghanistan over the Helmand River is another example.
https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2023/may/30/iran-and-afghanistan-clash-over-water-rights
omments above are hard to follow because they are not in order according to time as the would be if the programmer assumed this was a general conversation among another of people.
instead it assumes a number of conversations,each between two people.
even if that were true, an “ordered according to time” would be easier to follow, especially if replies were “addressed to,” except in those cases where a person is not allowed to speak to another person.
Dale, toughen up, okay? Go to a Packers or Steelers or Broncos site with heavy commenting and this place will feel like kindergarten when you come back.
Eric
I think I am tough enough, maybe too tough fors wome people. what works for a “big” blog with thousands of comments and commenters does not work very well for a small blog where conversations occur among several people and it gets hard or tedious to try to keep looking for ends of threads. simple ordering by time works and has worked for AB. it might not where there are thousands of “conversations” going on at once.
Water wars? Wait until they start over who controls the great lakes. There have been rumbles for years as to the piping of water west from them and those of the lakes saying hell no.
As to forest. Think of what will come of the rain forest as people move south from the equator. They won’t just come north.
How much longer will it be before we see business moving from the current areas of weather disaster areas. I’m not talking just insurance pulling out, though they are forcing the issue.
Daniel:
Not going to happen and should not happen. I am in AZ now. The building of housing, apartments, and stores is crazy. They know they have issues with water and they still, still are taking applications for developments. The US should have slapped a moratorium on building in this region until they figure out what water usage is allowed to be. Which is why I said what I said in the beginning.
@Dan, on the Great Lakes as a source of water;
people look at the Great Lakes as a near infinite store, but the drainage basin is relatively small; the flow on the Detroit River is roughly half that of the flow on the Ohio river at Cairo, Illinois…it wouldn’t take too much of a draw to shut down Great Lakes shipping and slow Niagara Falls to a trickle…
Exactly, but flows out of upper Mississippi states must prompt a lot of daydreaming in Vegas and Phoenix.
Heck, you can’t legally pump Lake Michigan water to very much of Wisconsin. Big lakes, but not much watershed. I won’t say it’ll never happen, though, but it will lag a robust market for high speed trains between LA and the Bay Area, which is floundering pretty badly now.
Joel:
I had read somewhere about the spreading of Iron Sulfate off the coast of Alaska and Canada. To stimulate plankton and more oxygen. Could not find that article. Did find this one; “100 tonnes of iron sulphate dumped off Canada’s Pacific coast” – Geoengineering Monitor
Except they claims issues with such.
@Bill,
From what I’ve read, there have been 14 experiments with iron fertilization in the several oceans. Only one reported evidence of significant carbon capture, but it is unclear whether the scale in terms of area and time was a fair test.
i wonder how big a test you need before you start something you can’t control.
there are still some problems here with how much CO2 mitigation we are going to be able to get from CO2 capture by industrial process, or by mucking with the oceans.
doesn’t seem to be much danger from turning it into rock, but you would need to “pump” the air to get concentrations that would feed a process that would do anything in less than geological time.
and it’s a bad excuse to put off the human behavior changes needed.
Bill
i haven’t seen any estimate of how fast CO2 capture can remove CO@ from the atmosphere. It disturbs me that I see other numbers that are relatively meaningless, but not this. And though I know what a half-life is, I am not seeing what that means or has to do with carbon capture.
i think the plankton growth, with or without iron, would have to occur in pens on shore and not just dumping more unknown unknowns into the ocean. also i wonder what the half life of SO2 in the atmosphere is before it reacts with ozone to beomce SO3 and then reacts with water to become sulfuric acid. remember acid rain?
i don’t claim to know much or anything about any of this, but seeing reports of magic high tech solutions that don’t even begin to discuss details unnerves me. this would not be the first time the doctors killed the patient, I haven’t seen a molecule of intelligence in the Congress in fifteen years (or read about it in eighty) and that is a simple problem. i have no faith the will not do something stupid about climate..not to mention the environment even w/o climate change, just as they have done nothing useful about climate change in the last 50 years since it became an established threat.
Coberly:
I did not have time to read more on this. This was an old foray of a year or so ago. It was actually done. And they know where the areas are being void of plankton.
The articles are out there and some are better than others. What is interesting is Biden’s effort to eliminate inefficient appliances, etc. Now I am sure every expert and politician in the world will react with “this” or “that” reasoning not to do such or anything or let the economic freedom of choice do it. It might impede freedom to remove anti-pollution devices from “to big-to fast-to often” vehicles or other expressions of but, but, but “its might right to have the freedom to “express” myself in this fashion.
Someone else will post from their knowledge base that this will not work. In the end we do nothing, nada, zip, etc.
There is always an excuse to do nothing. Then we get to the very preventable other side and the we shouldas start.
I always liked to work in a vacuum where no one was paying attention. Could study the issue, see were the need or slack was, and make changes. I would get the “how did you do that” questions.
DOE: “the DOE projected the regulations, which are slated to go into effect in 2029, would save Americans about $198 billion while curbing emissions by 501 million metric tons over the next three decades. That’s roughly the same carbon footprint as 63 million homes or half of all homes nationwide.”
Meanwhile, how many more homes will be built or crappy cheap products made. The technology exists now to build more efficient and effective thigs or housing and less costly too. Too late to start the DOE plan. The Repubs have already started their ballyhooing the effort.
Bill
it’sprobably my fault, but i did not understand your comment.
whoever’s planting trees has their work cut out for them; already this year, patches of trees amounting to an area the size of Ohio have burned in Canada, and over 1000 fires are still going strong up there…& while you’re capturing carbon, be sure to figure on capturing the 249 million tonnes of carbon released by those Canadian fires alone through July 17th
well, the trees are supposed to do that, but it’s a lot harder to plant a forest than it is to plant trees.
back when atmospheric CO2 was at 417 parts per million, i figured there to be 1530196993990000 cubic meters of the stuff out there, based on the size of the atmosphere that someone here at Angry Bear gave me; that was about two years ago, and the peak atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen to 424 parts per million since….the point is, if you’re going to try to capture all that CO2, you’re going to need a pretty big bottle…
@rjs,
The oceans are pretty large. And if you think about it, all that carbon had to come from terrestrial sources, so the “bottle” exists.
joel, that’s where the solid/liquid/gas physics i mentioned in your earlier thread comes in…most terrestrial sources of atmospheric carbon existed as solids or liquids before we extracted them…but once we burned them, the resultant carbon dioxide gas occupies roughly 1000 times more space…& it will take more energy to get that CO2 back into the bottle than it took to get it out..
@rjs,
“. . . it will take more energy to get that CO2 back into the bottle than it took to get it out.”
Yes, but in the case of phytoplankton (the subject of my post), the carbon capture process is green.
ok, Joel, i’ll give your phytoplankton a shot at fixing our problem, or at least keep it from getting worse…global energy-related CO2 emissions were at 36.3 billion tonnes in 2021, the latest year we have data for, so we’d at least expect our geoengineering scheme to offset that, right? so, how much iron (and other nutrients, because the little buggers certainly don’t live by iron alone) would we have to add to the ocean such that phytoplankton death rate reaches a level to take 36.3 billion tons of carbon to the ocean floor?
second question; obviously, dumping all that iron in one place is not gonna work; it’s got to be spread around the 7 seas so that we get our phytoplankton growing and dying everywhere…how do we achieve that? as far as i know, an ocean iron spreader without a carbon footprint of its own has not been invented yet; so before we can even start to consider growing phytoplankton to capture carbon, we have to know how much carbon we’re going to emit in the process of jump starting that growth…
it also occurs to me that this won’t be a one & done operation, either, because when those little phytoplankton die and deep six that carbon they’re partially made of, they’ll also be taking that iron to the ocean floor too…
so before we start, we have to know what the upfront carbon costs are of building a fleet of ocean iron spreaders; and we want to know the full-cycle carbon costs, ie, down to the diesel fuel used in the equipment that mines the ores that will be smelted into the metals that build your fleet of ocean iron spreaders, and the carbon energy consumption of the factories where the fleet will be manufactured…
rjs:
No one said this would fix the entire carbon issue. Even so, phytoplankton is estimated to produce nearly half the daily oxygen in our atmosphere, and as the basis of the ocean food web, sustain all major marine life forms. However phytoplankton blooms can deprive the ocean of sunlight which impacts marine life also. There is a delicate balance to this. Also, I do not believe either Joel or I have advocated a global spread of iron. There are areas which could benefit from this effort.
There is international protocols for this type of dumping. In retrospect, I gave a partial explanation of what may be helpful. Joel added t it. It is a delicate process fraught with pluses and minuses. There are areas of ocean which “may” benefit from such fertilization. In particular, the Alaska-Canada was one of them, Chili is another, etc. It could be a plus factor. An easy read; Snithsonian: The Complicated Role of Iron in Ocean Health and Climate Change
A broad assumption with your fleet of ships comment.
Joel:
I agree. How ever those steps have to start happening soon even if they are the tiny steps to improve.
The problem with carbon capture is scale.
I calculated that just pumping all the CO2 emissions from 1 year, in pure gaseous form, would require 500 gigawatt-hours of electricity. Multiply this by 1/(425/1 million) – it would require 5% of the entire world’s electricity consumption in a year just to pump the air containing CO2.
The actual process of separating CO2 from air would be enormously more energy intensive.
As such, the idea of geoengineering to even just equalize CO2 levels in the atmosphere is nonsense.
@c1ue,
I’m not clear on why one would need to pump air to do carbon capture using phytoplankton (the subject of my post). Can you elaborate on this requirement in the iron fertilization strategy?
i could not find a discussion of half life relevant to greenhouse gasses in ten seconds, but I did find one on medicines, and it included the following caution, which i think might be relevant to using the word in the global warming context:
Within the concept of half-life, many assumptions are necessary, including a one-compartment system metabolizing the drug, a perfectly first-ordered system free of any renal or hepatic deficiencies, and an isolated system without any drug-drug interactions or alternative metabolic pathways. This situation is seldom the case in a clinical setting where physicians have patients who present with chronic kidney disease or other ailments, and who may take numerous medications with potential drug interactions. Also, patient age is a significant factor in determining the accurate half-life of a drug, particularly for pediatric and geriatric patients in which drug metabolism and thus half-life can vary significantly from a healthy middle-aged adult. Because of the highly theoretical model of half-life, it is often challenging to implement into practice and use it as a tool for clinical decision making. Thus, medical students and physicians need to factor such realities into half-life calculations for effective and safe pharmacological management. Numerous studies have attempted to establish methodologies that account for such nuances in the management of disease based on individual pharmacokinetic drug profiles.[7][8]
in other words, look out for all the interactions, especially, i think, continuing input of the target molecules over time.
i mentioned the need to “pump” air to achieve useful concentrations of CO2 for the mineralization process to work meaningful. this may have gotten lost in the convertion and not noticed by those who were not clear on why…though they did see to change the topic from “factory remineralization” to plankton which might not need pumping..but which doesn’t seem to have kept up with man made increases in atmospheric carbon. i myself am “not sure” I know how much surface area would be needed to support the amount of extra plankton needed to catch up. but “I don’t know”..only suggest that while we think about these things we still need to do about our own addiction to gasoline. at what point does our continuing to increase adding CO2 overwhelm any Big Science attempts to keep up?
Vaguely related?
Scientists detect sign that a crucial Atlantic Ocean current is near collapse
Washington Post via Boston Globe – July 25
The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.
Scientists have long seen the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, as one of the planet’s most vulnerable “tipping elements” — meaning the system could undergo an abrupt and irreversible change, with dramatic consequences for the rest of the globe. Under Earth’s current climate, this aquatic conveyor belt transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. But as rising global temperatures melt Arctic ice, the resulting influx of cold freshwater has thrown a wrench in the system — and could shut it down entirely.
The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around the middle of this century. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on either side of the Atlantic.
“This is a really worrying result,” said Peter Ditlevsen, a climate physicist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the new study. “This is really showing we need a hard foot on the brake” of greenhouse gas emissions.
Ditlevsen’s analysis is at odds with the most recent report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which drew on multiple climate models and concluded with “medium confidence” that the AMOC will not fully collapse this century.
Other experts on the phenomenon also cautioned that because the new study doesn’t present new observations of the entire ocean system — instead, it is extrapolating about the future based on past data from a limited region of the Atlantic — its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
“The qualitative statement that AMOC has been losing stability in the last century remains true even taking all uncertainties into account,” said Niklas Boers, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “But the uncertainties are too high for a reliable estimate of the time of AMOC tipping.”
The new study adds to a growing body of evidence that this crucial ocean system is in peril. Since 2004, observations from a network of ocean buoys have shown the AMOC getting weaker — though the limited time frame of that data set makes it hard to establish a trend. Scientists have also analyzed multiple “proxy” indicators of the current’s strength, including microscopic organisms and tiny sediments from the seafloor, to show the system is in its weakest state in more than 1,000 years.
For their analysis, Peter Ditlevsen and his colleague and sister, Susanne Ditlevsen, examined records of sea surface temperatures going back to 1870. In recent years, they found, temperatures in the northernmost waters of the Atlantic have undergone bigger fluctuations and taken longer to return to normal. The scientists said these are “early warning signals” that the AMOC is becoming critically unstable — like the increasingly wild wobbles before a tower of Jenga blocks starts to fall.
Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen, then developed an advanced mathematical model to predict how much more wobbling the AMOC system can handle. The results suggest that the AMOC could collapse between now and 2095, and as early as 2025, the authors said. …
Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation
Nature Communications – July 25
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. …
Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century
NY Times – July 25
The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.
That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.
A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.
It was a surprise even to the researchers that their analysis showed a potential collapse coming so soon, one of them, Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen, said in an interview. Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.
Which is why it was also a surprise, Dr. Ditlevsen said, that she and her co-author were able to pin down the timing of a collapse at all. Scientists are bound to continue studying and debating the issue, but Dr. Ditlevsen said the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said. …
The new research, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment. …
In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).
These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.
As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing. …
Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude. Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.
Evidence from ice and sediment cores indicates that the Atlantic circulation underwent abrupt stops and starts in the deep past. But scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.
Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.
“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”
They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095. …
“medium confidence” that the AMOC will not fully collapse this century”
good. nothing to worry about then. enty of time to fill the oceans with iron and carbon dioxide and all the mountains with carbonate rocks if that’s not enough space.
any word from the other critters? but good to hear we are thinking about keeping the lights on in Vegas..
True, if you ignore this:
“The scientists said these are “early warning signals” that the AMOC is becoming critically unstable — like the increasingly wild wobbles before a tower of Jenga blocks starts to fall.
Susanne Ditlevsen, a statistician at the University of Copenhagen, then developed an advanced mathematical model to predict how much more wobbling the AMOC system can handle. The results suggest that the AMOC could collapse between now and 2095, and as early as 2025, the authors said.”
Maybe not persuasive to base climate collapse projections on the vagaries of a party game.
AMAZON: Drunk Jenga
@Fred,
The reference to Jenga was a simile, not the basis for the projections.
From the Nature paper:
“We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions. …
We predict with high confidence the tipping to happen as soon as mid-century (2025–2095 is a 95% confidence range). These results are under the assumption that the model is approximately correct, and we, of course, cannot rule out that other mechanisms are at play, and thus, the uncertainty is larger. However, we have reduced the analysis to have as few and sound assumptions as possible, and given the importance of the AMOC for the climate system, we ought not to ignore such clear indicators of an imminent collapse.”
Indeed, no references to Jenga in the Nature paper. Just in the WashPo.
No need to rush into anything. Maybe.
Because, y’know, we’re not going to rush into anything anyway.
And maybe it’s not too late. Or maybe it already is too late.
Do you suppose more people are going to read the WashPo piece than the Nature piece (which is very technical) and wonder about the Jenga reference, and this not being very serious matter.
@Fred,
I had a subscription to Nature for decades. The dead tree version came to my mailbox every week. I didn’t get past the front door without reading the TOC, and would read some of the articles over dinner. I did co-author a News and Views in Nature and have refereed articles for them. Also co-authored three other articles in Nature family journals. My wife has a subscription to the WaPo, but I don’t read it for science.
As for the climate and humanity, it is already too late unless we can figure out a fix with carbon capture and/or geoengineering.
This particular article is in Nature Communications, it seems.
Nature Communications is an open access, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, health, physical, chemical, Earth, social, mathematical, applied, and engineering sciences. Papers published by the journal aim to represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field.
In my role as a medical librarian, we receive many requests for articles in the various Nature journals, of which there are many, and fortunately I have a good source that provides access, but the open ones are just out there, accessible to all.
Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation
Nature Communications
The dinosaurs didn’t know what them. At least we will know.
@Fred,
Indeed. And the dinosaurs couldn’t have prevented it. We could have, but won’t.
Dinosaurs were powerful, if not intelligent.
Dinosaurs were all dumb. We are just mostly dumb, evidently.
Maybe it’s too late to stop it.
Maybe it it’s not too late. What have we got to lose?
If it’s God’s Will, then we would only piss Him off if we interfered.
There’s yer explanation.
OTOH, suppose it’s all just another crazy liberal scheme.
What if we spent all that guv’mint money and it turned out not to have been necessary, which the investigations would reveal after the money was spent, of course. Then we would really feel dumb.
Heat Is Costing the US Economy Billions in Lost Productivity
NY Times – July 31
As much of the United States swelters under record heat, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have gone on strike in part to protest working conditions that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
On triple-digit days in Orlando, utility crews are postponing checks for gas leaks, since digging outdoors dressed in heavy safety gear could endanger their lives. Even in Michigan, on the nation’s northern border, construction crews are working shortened days because of heat.
Now that climate change has raised the Earth’s temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history, with projections showing that they will only climb further, new research shows the impact of heat on workers is spreading across the economy and lowering productivity.
Extreme heat is regularly affecting workers beyond expected industries like agriculture and construction. Sizzling temperatures are causing problems for those who work in factories, warehouses and restaurants and also for employees of airlines and telecommunications firms, delivery services and energy companies. Even home health aides are running into trouble. …
A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.
The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050. …
Heat Is Costing the US Economy Billions in Lost Productivity
NY Times – July 31
… A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.
The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050. …
Other research found that as the mercury reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit, productivity slumps by about 25 percent and when it goes past 100 degrees, productivity drops off by 70 percent.
And the effects are unequally distributed: in poor counties, workers lose up to 5 percent of their pay with each hot day, researchers have found. In wealthy counties, the loss is less than 1 percent.
Of the many economic costs of climate change —- dying crops, spiking insurance rates, flooded properties — the loss of productivity caused by heat is emerging as one of the biggest, experts say. …
Still, there are no national regulations to protect workers from extreme heat. In 2021, the Biden administration announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would propose the first rule designed to protect workers from heat exposure. But two years later, the agency still has not released a draft of the proposed regulation.
Seven states have some form of labor protections dealing with heat, but there has been a push to roll them back in some places. In June, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law that eliminated rules set by municipalities that mandated water breaks for construction workers, even though Texas leads all states in terms of lost productivity linked to heat, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by Vivid Economics. …
From an op-ed in todays’s Boston Globe…
… Pew Research Center data from 2022 found that 1 in 4 Americans think we are living in end times. It’s no wonder. With climate change, the rise of artificial intelligence (and related concerns of human extinction), and extreme political polarization, (while) you’re wondering if society will make it through another year. …