What’s the worst case scenario involving climate change given that for some reason no large scale wars occur due to its contributing instability?
Climate change is very mainstream, with plenty of people and dollars working on the issue. LW and LW-adjacent groups discuss many causes that are thought to be higher impact and have more room for attention.
But I realised recently that my understanding of climate change related risks could probably be better, and I’m not easily able to compare the scale of climate change related risks to other causes. In particular I’m interested in estimations of metrics such as lives lost, economic cost, and similar.
If anyone can give me a rundown or point me in the right direction that would be appreciated.
Just to say, the clathrate gun has probably gone off.
The shallow sea up between Alaska and Russia is now outgassing methane, and it is producing a stationary high pressure ridge somehow. That weather front has been there for 3 years now, pushing winter storm tracks down to the SW states. That is also hindering rain which may have fallen in California, ending up down in Mexico.
There is another stationary high out by Iceland,just reported this year, perhaps caused by the same thing.
Also be aware that the big conference held last year in England on ocean feedbacks, dis-invited the two top field researchers, and only had academics present papers. Prime one is Sharkova, who has done fieldwork throughout the arctic.
I think that climate change is a situation where we should directly go to plan B. Plan A here is cutting emissions. It is not working, because it is very expensive and require cooperation of all sides. It also will have immediate results and the temperature will still grow by many reasons.
The plan B in climate change prevention is changing opacity of earth atmosphere. It could be surprisingly cheap and local. There are suggestions to put something as simple as sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere to rise it reflection ability.
“According to Keith’s calculations, if operations were begun in 2020, it would take 25,000 metric tons of sulfuric acid to cut global warming in half after one year. Once under way, the injection of sulfuric acid would proceed continuously. By 2040, 11 or so jets delivering roughly 250,000 metric tons of it each year, at an annual cost of $700 million, would be required to compensate for the increased warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide. By 2070, he estimates, the program would need to be injecting a bit more than a million tons per year using a fleet of a hundred aircraft.” https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-plan-to-stop-global-warming/
The problem with that approach is that it can’t be stopped. As Seth Baum wrote smaller catastrophe could result in disruption of such engineering and immediate return of global warming with vengeance.
There are other ways to prevent global warming. Plan C is creating artificial nuclear winter by volcanic explossion or starting large scale forest fires with nukes.
There are also ideas to recapture CO2 using genetically modified organisms, iron seeding in ocean and dispersing carbon capturing mineral olivine.
So we are not even closed to be doomed from global warming—but we may have to change the way we react on them. We must agree that cutting emission is not working in next 10-20 years perspective.
There are other ways to prevent global warming. Plan C is creating artificial nuclear winter by volcanic explossion or starting large scale forest fires with nukes.
Goes straight into the “Shit LW people say” bucket.
I think starting forest fires with flamethrowers, or cooling the Earth by painting things white, is probably the less exciting but more sensible approach.
I would still be a bit reluctant to advocate climate engineering, though. The main worry, of course, is that if we choose that route, we need to commit to in the long term, like you said. Openly embracing climate engineering would probably also cause emissions to soar, as people would think that there’s no need to even try to lower emissions any more. So, if for some reason the delivery of that sulfuric acid into the atmosphere or whatever was disrupted, we’d be in trouble. And do we know enough of such measures to say that there safe?. Of course, if we believe that history will end anyways within decades or centuries because of singularity, long-term effects of such measures may not matter so much.
Also, many people, whether or not they’re environmentalists strictly speaking, care about keeping our ecosystems at least somewhat undisrupted, and large scale climate engineering doesn’t fit too well with that view.
But I agree that we’re not progressing fast enough with emissions reductions (we’re not progressing with them at all, actually), so we’ll probably have to resort to some kind of plan B eventually.
The main worry, of course, is that if we choose that route, we need to commit to in the long term, like you said.
I don’t know about that. I would expect the main worry to be that the Law of Unintended Consequences will do its usual thing except this time the relative size of its jaws compared to our ass will be… rather large.
In current political situation in the world cutting emissions can’t be implemented. Point.
It may happening naturally in 20 years after electric transportation will take place.
Plan B should be implemented if situation suddenly change to worse. If temperature jumps 3-5 C in one year. In this case the only option we had is to bomb Pinatubo volcano to make it erupting again.
But if we will have prepared and tested measures of Sun shielding, we could start them if situation will be worsening.
It all looks like political fight between Plan A and Plan B. You suggest not to implement Plan B as it would show real need to implement Plan A (cutting emissions). But the same logic works in the opposite direction. They will not cut emission to press policymakers to implement plan B. ))) It looks like prisoners dilemma of two plans.
It all looks like political fight between Plan A and Plan B. You suggest not to implement Plan B as it would show real need to implement Plan A (cutting emissions).
That’s one thing. But also, let’s say that we choose Plan B, and this is taken as a sign that reducing emissions is unnecessary and global emissions soar. We then start pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the climate.
Then something happens and this process stops: we face unexpected technical hurdles, or maybe the implementation of this plan has been largely left to a smallish number of nations and they are incapable or unwilling to implement it anymore, perhaps a large-scale war occurs, or something like that. Because of the extra CO2, we’d probably be worse off than if we had even partially succeeded with Plan A. So what’s the expected payoff of choosing A or B?
As I said, I’m a bit wary of this, but I also think that it’s important to research climate engineering technologies and make plans so that they can be implemented if (and probably when) necessary. The best option would probably be a mixture of plans A and B, but as you said, it looks like a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma.
One more thing I would like to add:
The management of climate risks depends of their predictability and it seems that it is not very high. Climate is very complex and chaotic system.
It may react unexpectedly on our actions. This means that longterm actions are less favourable. The situation could change many times during their implementation.
The quick actions like solar management are better for management of poor predictable processes, as we could see result of our action and quickly cancel them or make them stronger if we don’t like the results.
I would also advocate for the mixture of both plans.
One more reason for it is that they work on different timescale. Cutting emission and removing CO2 on current level of technologies would takes decades to have an impact on climate. But geo-engineering has reaction time around 1 year so we could use it to cover bumps on the road.
Such covering will be especially important if we consider the fact that even if we completely stop emissions, we could also stop global dimming from coal burning which would result in 3 C jump. Stopping emissions may result in temperature jump and we need protection system in this case.
Anyway we need to survive until stronger technologies. Using nanotech or genetic engineering we could solve worming problem with smaller efforts. But we have to survive until with date.
It looks for me that cutting emissions is overhyped and solar management is “underhyped” in public opinion and funding. And by changing with misbalance we could get more common good.
Actually, some of the geoengineering has been tried/studied, the acid in atmo, and the ocean dumped iron.
The iron addition worked quite well, quadrupling the sea catch of fish, and creating a bloom of aquatic algae and plankton. If we can dump in a priming of shell creating plankton, along with the iron, you can pull down quite a bit of ocean CO2, and send it to sea bottom. I think they have only published one sci paper on it, but a couple other papers on econ gains were put out before they raided and arrested the folks that carried it out. The Canandian natives were pretty pleased with the results, tho.
The other easily reversible technique would be solar reflectors in orbit. These could be dual tasked to be solar power satts, to offset some power production. If you sent that power to the most polluting countries grids, they could de-commission some of the worst power plants and cement factories. Studies in progress, models launched to test, lots of theoretical studies under solar sail tech. And the SLS needs something to launch.....
Maybe someone better at statistics than me (I’ll withhold my own suspicions of the answer) can answer a question:
Given that life has been around for billions of years without very many huge extinction events, it seems likely that the environment is a very stable system and runaway global warming is false.
However, if the environment is an extremely unstable system, such that runaway global warming always results in total extinction of all life, then the anthropic principle comes info effect.
So my question is: Can we actually then say that runaway global warming is a small probability event?
Well, we could look at other planets that show any sign of ever having had an Earthlike atmosphere. Here’s (I think) the list of such planets we know about and are able to observe: {Venus}.
That might be a pretty bad sign, but I’m not sure Venus’s history is similar enough to earth’s. (E.g., whatever got its atmosphere the way it is, it probably wasn’t overproduction of CO2 by burning fossil fuels. Though, actually, I’m not sure how we’d know.)
Venus doesn’t have magnetic field.
Because of it, Venus lost hydrogen from its atmosphere due to solar wind.
Because of it Venus became very dry.
So, it had not life and ways to fix CO2 in carbonates in water.
It resulted in large accumulation of CO2 in atmosphere and strong greenhouse effect.
It changed the way its mantle creates continents as dry mantle is not plastic. There is no plate tectonics on Venus.
The surface changes every half a billion years in one large “supervolcanic” event.
The absolute worst case? Probably involves simultaneous and rapid release of the clathrates and the melting of the permafrost, a major disruption of the weather (in particular, precipitation) patterns across the globe, ocean currents—notably the Gulfstream—changing their course, etc. Ah, go read any horror fiction by environmentalists. They wrote a lot.
I think many EAs consider climate change to be very important, but often just think that it receives a lot of attention already and solving it is difficult, and that there are therefore better things to focus on. Like 80 000 hours for example.
What’s the worst case scenario involving climate change given that for some reason no large scale wars occur due to its contributing instability?
Climate change is very mainstream, with plenty of people and dollars working on the issue. LW and LW-adjacent groups discuss many causes that are thought to be higher impact and have more room for attention.
But I realised recently that my understanding of climate change related risks could probably be better, and I’m not easily able to compare the scale of climate change related risks to other causes. In particular I’m interested in estimations of metrics such as lives lost, economic cost, and similar.
If anyone can give me a rundown or point me in the right direction that would be appreciated.
Runaway global warming—small probability event with extinction level consequences. http://arctic-news.blogspot.ru/
Just to say, the clathrate gun has probably gone off.
The shallow sea up between Alaska and Russia is now outgassing methane, and it is producing a stationary high pressure ridge somehow. That weather front has been there for 3 years now, pushing winter storm tracks down to the SW states. That is also hindering rain which may have fallen in California, ending up down in Mexico. There is another stationary high out by Iceland,just reported this year, perhaps caused by the same thing.
Also be aware that the big conference held last year in England on ocean feedbacks, dis-invited the two top field researchers, and only had academics present papers. Prime one is Sharkova, who has done fieldwork throughout the arctic.
http://www.weatherwest.com/archives/tag/ridiculously-resilient-ridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridiculously_Resilient_Ridge
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-unusual-weather-pattern-at-the-root-of-californias-drought
and the scientists discuss forcings at sea
http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php
I think that climate change is a situation where we should directly go to plan B. Plan A here is cutting emissions. It is not working, because it is very expensive and require cooperation of all sides. It also will have immediate results and the temperature will still grow by many reasons.
The plan B in climate change prevention is changing opacity of earth atmosphere. It could be surprisingly cheap and local. There are suggestions to put something as simple as sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere to rise it reflection ability.
“According to Keith’s calculations, if operations were begun in 2020, it would take 25,000 metric tons of sulfuric acid to cut global warming in half after one year. Once under way, the injection of sulfuric acid would proceed continuously. By 2040, 11 or so jets delivering roughly 250,000 metric tons of it each year, at an annual cost of $700 million, would be required to compensate for the increased warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide. By 2070, he estimates, the program would need to be injecting a bit more than a million tons per year using a fleet of a hundred aircraft.” https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-plan-to-stop-global-warming/
The problem with that approach is that it can’t be stopped. As Seth Baum wrote smaller catastrophe could result in disruption of such engineering and immediate return of global warming with vengeance.
There are other ways to prevent global warming. Plan C is creating artificial nuclear winter by volcanic explossion or starting large scale forest fires with nukes.
There are also ideas to recapture CO2 using genetically modified organisms, iron seeding in ocean and dispersing carbon capturing mineral olivine.
So we are not even closed to be doomed from global warming—but we may have to change the way we react on them. We must agree that cutting emission is not working in next 10-20 years perspective.
Goes straight into the “Shit LW people say” bucket.
I think starting forest fires with flamethrowers, or cooling the Earth by painting things white, is probably the less exciting but more sensible approach.
Frankly, I wouldn’t use the word “sensible” anywhere near these approaches :-/
Hang on, wouldn’t starting forest fires create more CO2?
I would still be a bit reluctant to advocate climate engineering, though. The main worry, of course, is that if we choose that route, we need to commit to in the long term, like you said. Openly embracing climate engineering would probably also cause emissions to soar, as people would think that there’s no need to even try to lower emissions any more. So, if for some reason the delivery of that sulfuric acid into the atmosphere or whatever was disrupted, we’d be in trouble. And do we know enough of such measures to say that there safe?. Of course, if we believe that history will end anyways within decades or centuries because of singularity, long-term effects of such measures may not matter so much.
Also, many people, whether or not they’re environmentalists strictly speaking, care about keeping our ecosystems at least somewhat undisrupted, and large scale climate engineering doesn’t fit too well with that view.
But I agree that we’re not progressing fast enough with emissions reductions (we’re not progressing with them at all, actually), so we’ll probably have to resort to some kind of plan B eventually.
I don’t know about that. I would expect the main worry to be that the Law of Unintended Consequences will do its usual thing except this time the relative size of its jaws compared to our ass will be… rather large.
In current political situation in the world cutting emissions can’t be implemented. Point.
It may happening naturally in 20 years after electric transportation will take place.
Plan B should be implemented if situation suddenly change to worse. If temperature jumps 3-5 C in one year. In this case the only option we had is to bomb Pinatubo volcano to make it erupting again.
But if we will have prepared and tested measures of Sun shielding, we could start them if situation will be worsening.
It all looks like political fight between Plan A and Plan B. You suggest not to implement Plan B as it would show real need to implement Plan A (cutting emissions). But the same logic works in the opposite direction. They will not cut emission to press policymakers to implement plan B. ))) It looks like prisoners dilemma of two plans.
That’s one thing. But also, let’s say that we choose Plan B, and this is taken as a sign that reducing emissions is unnecessary and global emissions soar. We then start pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the climate.
Then something happens and this process stops: we face unexpected technical hurdles, or maybe the implementation of this plan has been largely left to a smallish number of nations and they are incapable or unwilling to implement it anymore, perhaps a large-scale war occurs, or something like that. Because of the extra CO2, we’d probably be worse off than if we had even partially succeeded with Plan A. So what’s the expected payoff of choosing A or B?
As I said, I’m a bit wary of this, but I also think that it’s important to research climate engineering technologies and make plans so that they can be implemented if (and probably when) necessary. The best option would probably be a mixture of plans A and B, but as you said, it looks like a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma.
One more thing I would like to add: The management of climate risks depends of their predictability and it seems that it is not very high. Climate is very complex and chaotic system.
It may react unexpectedly on our actions. This means that longterm actions are less favourable. The situation could change many times during their implementation.
The quick actions like solar management are better for management of poor predictable processes, as we could see result of our action and quickly cancel them or make them stronger if we don’t like the results.
I would also advocate for the mixture of both plans.
One more reason for it is that they work on different timescale. Cutting emission and removing CO2 on current level of technologies would takes decades to have an impact on climate. But geo-engineering has reaction time around 1 year so we could use it to cover bumps on the road.
Such covering will be especially important if we consider the fact that even if we completely stop emissions, we could also stop global dimming from coal burning which would result in 3 C jump. Stopping emissions may result in temperature jump and we need protection system in this case.
Anyway we need to survive until stronger technologies. Using nanotech or genetic engineering we could solve worming problem with smaller efforts. But we have to survive until with date.
It looks for me that cutting emissions is overhyped and solar management is “underhyped” in public opinion and funding. And by changing with misbalance we could get more common good.
Actually, some of the geoengineering has been tried/studied, the acid in atmo, and the ocean dumped iron.
The iron addition worked quite well, quadrupling the sea catch of fish, and creating a bloom of aquatic algae and plankton. If we can dump in a priming of shell creating plankton, along with the iron, you can pull down quite a bit of ocean CO2, and send it to sea bottom. I think they have only published one sci paper on it, but a couple other papers on econ gains were put out before they raided and arrested the folks that carried it out. The Canandian natives were pretty pleased with the results, tho.
The other easily reversible technique would be solar reflectors in orbit. These could be dual tasked to be solar power satts, to offset some power production. If you sent that power to the most polluting countries grids, they could de-commission some of the worst power plants and cement factories. Studies in progress, models launched to test, lots of theoretical studies under solar sail tech. And the SLS needs something to launch.....
Maybe someone better at statistics than me (I’ll withhold my own suspicions of the answer) can answer a question:
Given that life has been around for billions of years without very many huge extinction events, it seems likely that the environment is a very stable system and runaway global warming is false.
However, if the environment is an extremely unstable system, such that runaway global warming always results in total extinction of all life, then the anthropic principle comes info effect.
So my question is: Can we actually then say that runaway global warming is a small probability event?
Well, we could look at other planets that show any sign of ever having had an Earthlike atmosphere. Here’s (I think) the list of such planets we know about and are able to observe: {Venus}.
That might be a pretty bad sign, but I’m not sure Venus’s history is similar enough to earth’s. (E.g., whatever got its atmosphere the way it is, it probably wasn’t overproduction of CO2 by burning fossil fuels. Though, actually, I’m not sure how we’d know.)
Venus doesn’t have magnetic field. Because of it, Venus lost hydrogen from its atmosphere due to solar wind. Because of it Venus became very dry. So, it had not life and ways to fix CO2 in carbonates in water. It resulted in large accumulation of CO2 in atmosphere and strong greenhouse effect. It changed the way its mantle creates continents as dry mantle is not plastic. There is no plate tectonics on Venus. The surface changes every half a billion years in one large “supervolcanic” event.
There is also the little issue of Venus receiving about twice the insolation than Earth....
But Venus albedo is 0.75, while Earth’s is 0.3. So Venus gets less solar energy than Earth, because of very white upper cloud cover http://www.universetoday.com/36833/albedo-of-venus/
I think that we strongly underestimate not only probability of runaway global warming but also fragility of our environment because of anthropic bias.
May be runaway global warming is long overdue in our planet and small human actions could trigger it.
I wrote an article about it several years ago, but I want to rewrite it completely. The current version is here: “Why anthropic principle stops to defend us: observation selection, future rate of natural disasters and fragility of our environment” http://www.slideshare.net/avturchin/why-anthropic-principle-stopped-to-defend-us-observation-selection-and-fragility-of-our-environment
The absolute worst case? Probably involves simultaneous and rapid release of the clathrates and the melting of the permafrost, a major disruption of the weather (in particular, precipitation) patterns across the globe, ocean currents—notably the Gulfstream—changing their course, etc. Ah, go read any horror fiction by environmentalists. They wrote a lot.
I think many EAs consider climate change to be very important, but often just think that it receives a lot of attention already and solving it is difficult, and that there are therefore better things to focus on. Like 80 000 hours for example.