The biggest thing nature did to fight climate change is no longer working | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing nature did to fight climate change is no longer working

qz.com

44 pointsstevekinney59 comments

“When they get warmer than average, forests in the tropics do not like it, and overall they tend to put more CO2 into the atmosphere than they take out,” says study co-author Pep Canadell, executive officer of the Global Carbon Project.

This particular statement strikes me as spin; if forests were producing more CO2 than they were consuming then by the necessities of chemistry the plants would start to die due to lack of sustenance (sugars, including cellulose, which are made from CO2 and photosynthesis).

Either the forest gets to a homeostasis, it start to expand, or it dies back vis a vis the partial derivative of impact of CO2 levels. If indeed the CO2 levels being produced are more than consumption then where are the plants getting their energy from? And don't say animals, because if that was the case then the animals would have to be eating more and more of the forests. The only case I can see is wide scale felling, but then wide scale felling is not a case of plants producing more CO2.

CO2 levels are a problem, but this short description of this report seems to be muddying the waters not making them more clear.

"Other important biophysical changes alter the amount of water that evaporates or transpires from plants and the soil, the roughness or unevenness of the plant canopy, and ultimately the extent of convective clouds and rainfall."

I think the author misreads the referenced science reports, in which it seems to me they are suggesting the forest becomes less of a carbon sink as it gets warmer.

http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Canadell_2010_...

Possibly on the plus side, increasing concentration of CO2 may be encouraging the growth of vegetation in previously bare regions.

"Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstrac...

The amount of CO2 being absorbed by plants is far less than the rate at which it is accumulating within the atmosphere. You can get a good idea of how much CO2 is absorbed by looking at the seasonal variation in atmospheric CO2.

https://github.com/fuzzgun/ccg

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2

This is a better graph.

What is the net planetary gain? Do the previously almost bare regions turn to totally bare at a slower rate?

One of the biggest problem humanity currently has in general is that morality only kicks-in in most people when there is a very direct link between their actions and some negative consequences. Once there is enough degrees of separation and abstraction nobody cares anymore. Most people would not slaughter an animal without really having to do it, but once it becomes a cheeseburger or a fur clothing nobody gives it a second thought. The problem is that the world of human affairs is getting more and more abstract as we specialize more and more and develop more complex technology, so more and more things get affected by this.

It is especially sad given that sometimes sacrificing a small convenience for one person would be able to make a huge change in somebody else's life. But again, once there are enough degrees of separation, we do not feel "in position" to help and we do not view it as our problem to do it.

We can talk about the psychological factors or we can simply tell it the way it is which is that economic growth increases the need for energy. Most production of energy and production of things cause by-products that are not a natural part of the system, in another words pollution. Pollution interferes with the natural functioning of the system. If we did not need to support such a large population or economic growth we would not be creating all this pollution. Therefore we could as a species inhabit the planet much longer (there are obviously natural sources of pollution that work on much longer time scales). Because we don't act responsibly and instead of taming our psychology we have let it loose on the world in the name of economic growth (and power of the current ruling elite) we will as a matter of course cause more and more pollution which will at some point start reducing the carrying capacity of the planet which will lead to smaller and smaller population until our species goes extinct. That's the natural course of humanity. Many people believe that more technology will save us, but is life really worth living being hooked up to a respirator with a miserable polluted planet barely capable of supporting life? Many people in the third world seem to think so, they keep producing even more misery.

I am with you up to the moment you talk about people in the third world, where I completely don't understand what you are up to, care to explain?

In the third world there is lots of pollution, over population, lack of food... But all of that does not keep people from producing yet more people. In a similar way the entire world does not stop and reconsider what they are doing instead it just keeps going hoping that technology will come in and save us from whatever problems we have created for ourselves. In fact that's really all humans do on the planet, create problems. They are problem engines.

I would have made almost the reverse claim: humanity has a well-defined threat-response instinct and we are constantly on the lookout for threats to ourselves, our family, our society. Like a social immune system. If there aren't any serious threats we can't just relax and live our lives - we have to invent some problems to worry about. Hence the never-ending stream of overblown largely imaginary threats - killer bees, crack babies, flag-burning, overpopulation, declining fertility, pesticides (eg, alar), GMOs, global cooling, global warming, "peak oil", fracking.

There is almost no correlation between how serious a threat is and how much we worry about it. In fact, the correlation is often inverse - we worry far more about child abductions and school shootings now that they almost never happen than we did when they happened more. Because if something happens all the time it's not "news". So a school shooting in any crappy city anywhere in the US prompts national headlines and gets us ALL worrying about whether our children are safe, whereas kids dying in auto accidents or house fires or drowning in swimming pools in much larger numbers don't even make the local newscast.

This would have made more sense if your example wasn't one so painfully biased in presentism. Animal slaughter was sort of a commonplace until we industrialized it; people weren't squeamish about it until the last few hundred years. Being squeamish is a status marker.

It would have made much more sense if you put a bit more effort into trying to interpret what I said and didn't assume I think animal-eating was invented 200 years ago...

People certainly have a different emotional reaction from watching an animal die, this reaction being almost completely unknown those days, than from buying a hamburger in the supermarket, which doesn't provoke any emotion whatsoever. Do I have to convince you very much that emotions play a big role in the so called "morality" and especially being able to act on it?

Obviously there are historical examples that there were people a very long time ago already that were concerned about the sad fate of the killed animals, for example Native Americans used to "thank" the animals they killed for providing food and ask them for forgiveness, Buddhist say "might you be reborn as a buddha" before eating meat etc., you will see this aspect of human life very carefully regulated by most religions, indicating it was a problem that concerned people from a very long time ago.

For another, more general example, try to convince someone of sacrificing a very, very minor modern convenience of theirs for some greater good. I often have to go to terrible pains to explain that I am perfectly fine with my current phone and I don't want to waste it to just get a new toy, and I am far from being any kind of ecology freak. When I buy crips and coke at a grocery 50m from my flat and don't want a plastic bag, the seller assures me that it's for free so I don't have to worry :) The people who actually use any more substantial effort to not deprive too much resources are very often gravely ridiculed, because most of society seems to view resources as unlimited.

>and didn't assume I think animal-eating was invented 200 years ago...

Sorry to jump here, but he clearly did not wrote that. He wrote in fact the opposite. He said we have been killing animals to survive for a very long time.

It is you who attach some kind of moral meaning to the act of killing and eating an animal. Some people have to do it, for them to feel purer (in the past) or hipsterer (now). I would prefer to become food at the end of my life, Soylent Green style, instead of such mind shenanigan‎s.

It's good that you don't ask for bags in the grocery, but in the end this means little if human population keeps growing and growing.

Well, if by few hundred years you mean at least ~2.2 millenia then yes, because Buddhism's dont-take-life preaching is at least that old.

And since when did the ethics and normalities of past become the standards by which our present should be governed? If animal slaughter is alright because it was okay a few hundred years ago then slavery, child marriage and hundred other nonsensical stuff should be alright as well. What we do now should be determined by how our society feels now and how it wants to invest in the future. Arguing that that our present actions should be governed by medieval ethics is lazy.

Your parent didn't talk about ethics at all, only about the supposed squeamishness that people have towards killing animals. If I am afraid of killing animals, that has nothing to do with my ethical stance on killing animals.

Um. I didn't make a value judgement on animal slaughter. I said he picked an ineffective example.

> Being squeamish is a status marker.

Bingo. Because if you're squeamish, that means you have someone else do it for you.

> Most people would not slaughter an animal without really having to do it,

Are you sure? The biggest problem I have with rod-fishing is that it is boring - not that the fish has to die (and I don't give less value to the life of a fish than, say, a pig, as some people tend to do). Sure, I haven't needed to slaughter my own livestock, but if I imagine that I have of only eaten oatmeal and potatoes for the last fourteen days, slaughtering some animal for its meat doesn't seem like such a terrible sacrifice. Now, I am not a farmer or a hunter, but if I were you could just argue that most people are not farmers and/or hunters.

The modern man may be squeamish, but the thing about humans are that we are great at adapting. A modern urban person might recoil at the thought of not getting at least one shower a day, getting to sleep in a comfortable bed and have food in the fridge at all times, but if push comes to shove and she has to for some reason survive in the wilderness or out on a farm, I'd say she would get used to that reality relatively quickly. And she might have been previously reserved towards killing animals since the reality of it was so removed for her, but again if the need arose she would probably not have much problem with it unless she already had some established ethical opposition to using animals for their meat, hide etc. After all, a good chunk of her ancestors probably had to have a hand in slaughtering animals.

One of the biggest problem humanity currently has in general is that morality only kicks-in in most people when there is a very direct link between their actions and some negative consequences.

Absolutely. We need to feel pain, otherwise we're lost.

And: We are the Boiling Frogs:

Increase the heat (=pain) slowly enough and we'll accept it as "The New Normal".

Increase the pain quickly enough, and we'll reject it and fight for our lives.

Should our action therefor be to concentrate on preparing for the "rebuiliding"?

The problem with the "boiling frog" analogy is that it's false. No actual frogs work like that. If you think humans work like that, it's fine to claim this, but referring to the behavior of imaginary frogs doesn't add anything to one's understanding.

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

I call BS on this article.

Tropical forests do next to nothing for global carbon fixation - they're about as far as you can get from "the biggest thing nature did"

Ocean plankton is by far the most important place for carbon sequestration.

Do not underestimate the swamps. Vast swamp areas in South Poland and Belarus are the kitchen of the European weather and a huge carbon sink. THe thing is biospheric carbon is really irrelevant if you compare its mass to what volcanic activity brought and bringing. The mass of the biospere is relatively constant thing over the last 3 billion years.

Ice caps melting -> more ocean -> more plankton -> less CO2.

The problem practically fixes itself!

Ice caps melting -> more ocean depth

more ocean surface -> more plankton

But the ocean absorbs a much larger portion of sunlight than the average land. Hence more energy absorbed if there's more ocean. And that leads to more heating.

Maybe something like boreal forests work best. But large carbon sinks like from the carboniferous era (coal and oil deposits) can't happen anymore anyway since fungi have evolved to break down wood.

Well, technically, if the ocean level rises, you will end up with more surface.

Especially since current land mass will be turned into sea. I was joking, though.

Isn't there a lot of land that is only a few meters above sea level (where a lot of humans like to live)? Say you have a valley and a river has been transporting down matter for a long time, forming a flat landscape at the bottom of the valley, only a few meters above sea level. If the sea rises only a few meters, this valley will be flooded easily, and there will be a lot of new surface area per cubic unit of water, in other words a lot of surface area for new plankton.

A pity about the humans that probably lived in that valley, though. ;)

Additional water in the oceans will not distribute evenly. Sea level will rise at some places and actually lower at other places. The net effect will probably be an increased sea surface, but it's not so easy to estimate by how much.

I think the problem is that forests cycle a lot of carbon, absorbing and then releasing a lot throughout the year. If the size of that reservoir goes down (implied by the article), then there is more 'free' carbon to go elsewhere in the system.

Umm.. nature's goal is not to sustain human life. It's our goal. If we screw up the planet, we literally will be screwing ourselves. Earth doesn't need us. It will reset in few million years by earthquakes and volcanoes and go again for better life.

Earth climate was never stable or unchanging. So nature certainly don't fight climate change.

> [...] and go again for better life.

To be fair, it might also reset in few million years to be nothing but earthquakes and volcanoes. See: Venus.

We still don't have any proof of earth having consciousness. Even if it has, it's probably not thinking in a human way... Do you really think it has the same definition of "screw up" as we do? Maybe earth thinks forests are itchy and hopes human beings to chop down all of them...

Actually, I am suggesting exactly the opposite of what you have interpreted.

The Revenge of Gaia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Revenge insinuates vindication for our actions by Earth. But Earth don't care. I like to think of it as a giant and complex spaceship rather than a living being.

I think you might be looking for this instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis

"The biggest thing nature did to fight climate change..."

...has always been the absorption of CO2 in the rocks of the Earth's crust. Or hasn't it? Well, this process is still working, but it won't be working for long, since there's almost no CO2 to absorb anymore.

There is no global warming. Period. Humans are not geological force. Period.

living organisms mass= 6,57×10^18g humanity mass = 2,27×10^14g total biosphere mass = 5,2×10^25g

Humans are not geological factor, I am afraid.

Globally plants and CO2 concentrations are in homeostatic relationship. Forest ecosystems of the temperate zone are very (very-very) resilient to average temperature changes.

What you really have to be afraid of is the new Ice Age. It happens regularly and suddenly.

The simplest observation is that the Mauna Loa data series for atmospheric CO2 has been very consistent and shows a steeper curve over time. That simply must be net-net all of the environmental changes going on around the world. Really based on that data set no one should have ever hoped that "the plants could keep up," because they never have. That is not in the record.

As an aside, and for the HN audience, boy ... "long read" pages that require the mouse to be mid screen for the scroll wheel to work are really pretty annoying.

Because the nature did so well to fight climate change before. You know, mass extinctions, ice ages...

Did volcanoes stopped everywhere? This is single most inadequate topic in my news feed today. Climate is always changing. And it is the Sun and the Earth's core which are the most powerful drivers of it. Did the Sun stopped shining?

Seems we're creating conditions to revert things to before the tipping point was reached - what it looks like before the tipping point, I'm sure someone has a more educated guess than not..

One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. Just two hundred years ago there was Little Ace Age and river Thames would freeze every winter. Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

Yet somehow it is 110% sure that our CO2 emissions are responsible for global warming. It is even crime to disagree with scientific hypotheses. And governments will happily `solve` this problem by taking away our rights. F*k this.

We should be solving other problems than cow farts; Urbanization, slums, fusion, wealth distribution...

> One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. Just two hundred years ago there was Little Ace Age and river Thames would freeze every winter.

One fairly well-supported theory of the cause of the Little Ice Age is that reforestation that due to a decline in Eurasian and American human populations led to an uptake in CO2 absorption [1] [2]. This suggests that at least partially anthropogenic climate change is a phenomenon which existed even before the Industrial Revolution. In any case,

> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

No [3]. Moreover, volcanic eruptions tend to have an overall dimming effect due to their release of sulfur-containing compounds which form sulfuric acid aerosol. There have even been some radical/crackpot geoengineering proposals to release sulfur into the atmosphere to combat global warming [4].

1: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/EI157.1 2: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/06/11/095968361140... 3: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming... 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_...

> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

Funny, the scientific consensus is that on average, on any given year vulcano emissions represent only about 1% of human emissions [1]. I would very much like to know where you got your numbers. It's very likely that you are being misled.

[1] http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming...

This is a bullshit climate denier argument. http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.h...

Humans produce on the order of 3.10^13 kg of CO2 [1] Atmosphere weighs 5.1 . 10^18 [2] so the CO2 we produce is 1/100000 (or 0.001%) of the total weight.

Atmosphere contains 0.046% CO2 by weight [3]. So, next year, it's going to be 0.047%. In other words, each year we increase the concentration of CO2 by 2%. This isn't only cow farts.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html

[2] http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.htm....

[3] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-composition-d_212.html

> One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland.

The current population of Greenland is about 56,300 with 15,400 living in the capital, Nuuk. Animals are kept and crops grown. So it's hardly shocking that the same was happening 1000 years ago.

> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

I don't believe this is true. Dixie Lee Ray made a claim similar to this in her book Trashing the Planet (regarding the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption) and Rush Limbaugh picked it up, but IIRC the original claim was based on a math error and a very questionable source. What is actually true that the Pinatubo explosion temporarily cooled the planet by much more than the predicted effect of a decade's worth of CO2 output. But it wasn't the CO2 output that did that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo

I wonder what the biochemistry behind this would be? Maybe the plants create carbon structures more efficiently at higher temps?

I'm looking forward positively on the perspective of all-year seaside resorts of Barentz see.

The next "biggest thing" nature will do will be population collapse.

You can pay to All Gore and others to have a false, but good feelings. It's just another propaganda to get You under control... Free society is "no good" for some people.

Hey, check this out:http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/07...