Uggggh I've been letting things build up in my inbox. Time to give it a good scrub~
The thing with climate change tho, is that apparently it just gets more *extreme.* The average temperature goes up, but so too the storminess and such. But it's all very conditional on where you live - there's the Pacific decadal oscillations and the general movement of air and seas and such, and year to year it's going to vary, so if it's particularly cold and snowy one winter like it's been here, that doesn't mean 'haha what's warming' or anything. Summers are much warmer, and the climate zones sort of...crawl up the globe, essentially? So my family in a semi-arid climate will start to see more rain and probably more storms, and spring thaw has been a *mess* up where I am (turns out the sewer system can be FULL??).
My advisor sent me a graph earlier this week with net atmospheric accumulation of CO2 over the last 50 years, and it's pretty bleak - every year we're adding more and more of the stuff, and having read large portions of the IPCC reports, I don't disagree that it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to reverse. My research is partially about 'well what if we tried injecting captured CO2 into reservoirs where it'll mineralize and just hang out for a while?' which actually would be feasible, though it wouldn't really help THAT much. The issue is more in the cumulative change - I had a friend try to argue once that, well, more CO2 is good for plants, right? and the planet has been warmer, we know that, no big deal, and I don't disagree at all. The *planet* can handle it. The *life on the planet* will be a little unhappy about it. (But we've come back from extinctions before, sooo...maybe we'll at least get some feathers first??)
I guess I'm sort of ambivalent, then. I agree that it's A Thing and probably we should do something about it; I'm pessimistic enough (especially when science gets turned political so much in my country - as though we can vote on the results of an experiment!) to think that we're probably stuck with how things are and should just start planning to move north. Sure, losing ice caps will mess with sea level, but tbh I deeply oppose heavy beachfront development and the way landowners etc try to fight natural longshore processes while also managing to screw up stuff *upstream* too x___x so I'm not sad to lose Florida, basically. And the overall warmness means there'll be lots of increasingly arable places farther north - good news for Canada and Russia, really. Where I get a little interested/concerned is that based on patterns and astronomical positions, as a planet we're actually looking to start an ice age in the next 20-50k years? So how will those two things play on each other - will the outside pressures of coldness chill things back down and help, or will the insulating effect of the increasingly warm atmosphere counteract it? it's not as though either is absolutely Must Happen, right?
I GUESS I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS. Most of them are: well, I mean, corporations, what are you gonna do about 'em, eh? I don't think individuals have a lot of effect here, even if we're the ones made uncomfortable by it?
OK WELL hopefully this comment thread isn't so old that it doesn't mail the notification ^^'''
The thing with climate change tho, is that apparently it just gets more *extreme.* The average temperature goes up, but so too the storminess and such. But it's all very conditional on where you live - there's the Pacific decadal oscillations and the general movement of air and seas and such, and year to year it's going to vary, so if it's particularly cold and snowy one winter like it's been here, that doesn't mean 'haha what's warming' or anything. Summers are much warmer, and the climate zones sort of...crawl up the globe, essentially? So my family in a semi-arid climate will start to see more rain and probably more storms, and spring thaw has been a *mess* up where I am (turns out the sewer system can be FULL??).
My advisor sent me a graph earlier this week with net atmospheric accumulation of CO2 over the last 50 years, and it's pretty bleak - every year we're adding more and more of the stuff, and having read large portions of the IPCC reports, I don't disagree that it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to reverse. My research is partially about 'well what if we tried injecting captured CO2 into reservoirs where it'll mineralize and just hang out for a while?' which actually would be feasible, though it wouldn't really help THAT much. The issue is more in the cumulative change - I had a friend try to argue once that, well, more CO2 is good for plants, right? and the planet has been warmer, we know that, no big deal, and I don't disagree at all. The *planet* can handle it. The *life on the planet* will be a little unhappy about it. (But we've come back from extinctions before, sooo...maybe we'll at least get some feathers first??)
I guess I'm sort of ambivalent, then. I agree that it's A Thing and probably we should do something about it; I'm pessimistic enough (especially when science gets turned political so much in my country - as though we can vote on the results of an experiment!) to think that we're probably stuck with how things are and should just start planning to move north. Sure, losing ice caps will mess with sea level, but tbh I deeply oppose heavy beachfront development and the way landowners etc try to fight natural longshore processes while also managing to screw up stuff *upstream* too x___x so I'm not sad to lose Florida, basically. And the overall warmness means there'll be lots of increasingly arable places farther north - good news for Canada and Russia, really. Where I get a little interested/concerned is that based on patterns and astronomical positions, as a planet we're actually looking to start an ice age in the next 20-50k years? So how will those two things play on each other - will the outside pressures of coldness chill things back down and help, or will the insulating effect of the increasingly warm atmosphere counteract it? it's not as though either is absolutely Must Happen, right?
I GUESS I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS. Most of them are: well, I mean, corporations, what are you gonna do about 'em, eh? I don't think individuals have a lot of effect here, even if we're the ones made uncomfortable by it?
OK WELL hopefully this comment thread isn't so old that it doesn't mail the notification ^^'''
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