The Big Picture by Lennie Peterson for October 03, 2016

Earth may remain – but our so-called civilization may not. We have passed the 400 ppm level for CO2, and it did not decline this summer as it normally does. That suggests that the oceans have maxed out their ability to absorb excess CO2.I realize this cartoon is about to be barraged by people rejecting this major scientific finding and its implications for human-caused global warming with some variant of “uh-UH!”, so I’m not speaking to them. They’re not listening anyway.I’m speaking to those of good will and respect for facts and science: we’re in trouble. And we are still the ONLY industrialized nation with a major party denying the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming.Granted, given Trump’s greatest gift is his ability to deny reality generally, I shouldn’t be surprised, but nearly the whole party has rejected fact-based reasoning as well, even before the so-called “leaders” of the GOP started caving to supporting Trump when they knew better.http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/here-s-the-carbon-dioxide-spiral/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/28/the-world-passes-400ppm-carbon-dioxide-threshold-permanently

After building the wall, Trump will build a HUGE underground city where he & his denier pals can live like the troglodytes they are.

Actually, there is a small, 6-7 ppm difference between the max and min CO2 in a year. That cycle happened this year, as it always has. But the minimum is now above 400 ppm..A signature for the oceans maxing out would be an accelerated rise in CO2. But it was already on an accelerating curve, because of the ever increased burning of fossil fuels. (Anyone stupid enough to think that is not happening hasn’t tracked the consumption rate, or the rate of increase of internal combustion engines.)..The rate of increase of engines is much greater than the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, so far. So the oceans are still working. When they aren’t the rate of atmospheric CO2 will rise at the same rate as the source..http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo_2011.html.Here’s the statistics on car and truck production:.http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2010-statistics/.200 million engines produced in 2011.http://www.oemoffhighway.com/news/10573220/production-milestone-for-reciprocating-internal-combustion-engines-on-the-horizon.Here’s a nice table of data from the Mauna Kea site: I am listing the peak reading of CO2, which is around May of each year.Year CO2 ppm1960 3201965 3221970 3281975 3331980 3411985 3481990 3571995 3632000 3712005 3822010 3932015 403.The rate of increase is increasing, so it’s not a linear growth. And the slightly lower increase from 2010 to 2015 is not significant. 2016 peaked at 406..And for the really clueless, yes, people do know how to take into account the daily output of the volcano. Even better, this data is replicated (with only slightly different numbers) at locations from Barrow, Alaska to La Jolla, to Samoa, to Antarctica. No volcanoes in La Jolla or Barrow, folks..https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_two_years.png.And the idiots who think that the CO2 is just going to make plants grow better forget two things. It will be hotter everywhere, which means that those crops that are adversely affected by heat will see more hot spells. .And to increase crops (more people, remember?) you need water, which is very rapidly becoming a rarer quantity for farmers..And no, you will not grow wheat in northern Canada’s tundra in a few years.

Thanks all for a well-reasoned and clear conversation on the science and logic of the problem. This is refreshing!

Maybe Gops have their own climate, like they have their own facts.

It’s hard to believe that, this deep into the 21st Century, we still have people who apparently don’t understand the difference between weather and climate. Here’s the deal: • Weather is short-term; climate is long-term. • Weather is individual measurements; climate is average measurements. • Weather is what you get; climate is what you expect. • Weather is umbrellas; climate is ice ages. • Weather is the city council; climate is the United Nations. • Weather is 3 minutes on TV; climate is doctoral dissertations. • Weather comes and goes; climate just keeps on coming. • Weather change kills off individual plants and animals; climate change kills off entire species. • Weather is Angry Birds; climate is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Any American adult who doesn’t understand this by now must be:(1) a social promotion from a special-ed class.(2) working for a fossil-fuel company and whose salary depends on the public not wising up during her or his lifetime.(3) deliberately disingenuous.(4) a religious fanatic who buys into the 2000-year-old lie that their favorite dead guy is due back tomoro, having disappointed a hundred previous generations of True Believers because he’s been waiting especially for YOU to be around when it happens, because that’s how important YOU are! These categories are not mutually exclusive.

Here’s a message to you storm Trumpers: http://tinyurl.com/hy6zhe2I can’t imagine that anyone that loves America can vote for this man. It’s chilling, to say the least, that he has over single digit support.

Where are all the usual right wing denier idiots?

@Crow NoboMaybe the existence of right-wing denier idiots was just a hoax perpetrated by China?

Wonderful comments….some funny and some very informative. Thank you all.

There are always too many urgent things to talk about during a prez debate. This is more true now than ever before.

How can you debate something that one side doesn’t even believe in? Scientific evidence? republicans don’t care. Physical evidence? Nope, they don’t care. Seeing the past temperature trends, they don’t seem to mind. An orange politician who doesn’t have a plan but says trust them because he has lost millions of dollars? A book written thousands of years ago? That is what they will listen to.

According to the graph in my reference on carbon emission, there are 10 billion metric tons of carbon emitted per year now.How many mature trees would be needed to store that amount?.Assumption 1, (highly arguable, but not too crazy) 1 mature tree every 5 meters. That means one tree every 15 feet. That means 4 trees in a 100 square meter area. That’s 40,000 trees in one square kilometer..Amount of carbon in a tree 1 meter in diameter (at chest height) and 20 meters tall: about 200 kg (rounded up).https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/images/long-content-page/Carbon%2BStored%2Bin%2BTrees%2Bby%2BSize-Table.pdf.So the carbon in our 1 square km is 8 million kg, or 8000 metric tons. Round up to 10,000 tons per square km..So every year, you would need to miraculously grow a million square km of well developed forest to equal what we currently burn..And that would take an amount of water greater than the mass of the carbon. (Trees are more than carbon and water)..10 billion metric tons of water is a lot of water. 10 cubic kilometers, in fact..The above calculation is only approximate, as a guide to thinking. It’s an example of what we physicists call a Fermi Problem..http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/09/02/436919052/tree-counter-is-astonished-by-how-many-trees-there-are.In heavy forest, there may be 1 million trees per square kilometer. So, I am a little on the low side, for heavy forest..I also found a link that said that the person planted trees about every two meters in an Ontario forested area. That would give about 250,000 trees per sq km.

Oh, and here is a nice article about forests and biomass..http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ForestCarbon/.One more thing….In my miracle solution, I neglected to take into account the amount of energy required to assemble a mass of carbon and water (plus other stuff not taken into account) into a mature tree. Calculating that is another Fermi problem….Hint, estimate number of years to grow such a tree (50-100???) How much sunlight hits the earth’s surface, how much of that is usable by the tree, allow for nights and cloudy days, etc etc etc).

Here is someone’s attempt at getting the daily amount of energy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fb2uz/have_we_ever_measured_the_caloric_intake_of_a_tree/

And then there are the problems about which we have little information:.Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 ProblemABSTRACTRising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), primarily from human fossil fuel combustion, reduces ocean pH and causes wholesale shifts in seawater carbonate chemistry. The process of ocean acidification is well documented in field data, and the rate will accelerate over this century unless future CO2 emissions are curbed dramatically. Acidification alters seawater chemical speciation and biogeochemical cycles of many elements and compounds. One well-known effect is the lowering of calcium carbonate saturation states, which impacts shell-forming marine organisms from plankton to benthic molluscs, echinoderms, and corals. Many calcifying species exhibit reduced calcification and growth rates in laboratory experiments under high-CO2 conditions. Ocean acidification also causes an increase in carbon fixation rates in some photosynthetic organisms (both calcifying and noncalcifying). The potential for marine organisms to adapt to increasing CO2 and broader implications for ocean ecosystems are not well known; both are high priorities for future research. Although ocean pH has varied in the geological past, paleo-events may be only imperfect analogs to current conditions... Ocean acidification and marine microorganisms: responses and consequencesSummaryOcean acidification (OA) is one of the global issues caused by rising atmospheric CO2. The rising pCO2 and resulting pH decrease has altered ocean carbonate chemistry. Microbes are key components of marine environments involved in nutrient cycles and carbon flow in marine ecosystems. However, these marine microbes and the microbial processes are sensitive to ocean pH shift. Thus, OA affects the microbial diversity, primary productivity and trace gases emission in oceans. Apart from that, it can also manipulate the microbial activities such as quorum sensing, extracellular enzyme activity and nitrogen cycling. Short-term laboratory experiments, mesocosm studies and changing marine diversity scenarios have illustrated undesirable effects of OA on marine microorganisms and ecosystems. However, from the microbial perspective, the current understanding on effect of OA is based mainly on limited experimental studies. It is challenging to predict response of marine microbes based on such experiments for this complex process. To study the response of marine microbes towards OA, multiple approaches should be implemented by using functional genomics, new generation microscopy, small-scale interaction among organisms and/or between organic matter and organisms. This review focuses on the response of marine microorganisms to OA and the experimental approaches to investigate the effect of changing ocean carbonate chemistry on microbial mediated processes.

Rather odd how one group of people trash Trump for ignoring reality while same particular group ignores the reality that their candidate is being paid a fortune by the very same polluters who are trashing our planet.

Thank you to Martens, Baslim, EMTc12, Motive Magnus and anyone I missed who gave great facts.

In short, we all jumped the shark, climatewise, some while back. Fasten your seat-belts ‘cuz it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. (My 94-year-old mother is glad she won’t be around to experience it. Myself, I’m genuinely worried.)

The problem with these “OMG the sky is falling” climate-change horror predictions is that nobody looks at the big pictures. Oceanographers just look at oceans, Geographers just look at earth. Weatherographers just look at their latest Super Doppler7000 and circle their arms around weather patterns. And so on.See, data is meaningless when it’s taken as an isolated point. See, for example, here’s a piece of data:2230Impressive, right? Now, if I just told you that number and said it was vitally important, what would happen? I’ll tell you what: an entire realm of science would pop into being dedicated to finding out what that number means, how it impacts our life. By the time the 2230ists were finished, the Theory of 2230 would relate to everything. Then other scientists would come along and say, no, you guys are wrong, the real Theory of 2230 is this. And so on, and so on, and so on. That’s what scientists do. They create meaning for things, then other scientists create another meaning, then they argue, then the government gives them grant money. And here’s the kicker: the truth is that 2230 is important, but each of them is just looking at it in isolation. Without understanding the big picture. They don’t know how all the parts fit together, or even what the parts are. And so they’re all wrong.Don’t get it? OK, let’s try it this way. Let’s pull back the lens a bit, take a look at the situation you’re describing. Water levels are rising. Oooh, scary. They’re rising faster than predicted. OOOOOOH, scarier. But what happens when you increase the total amount of water in a given surface? Hm? Volume, remember that? The water’s volume increases. OK, see that’s something that an oceanographer doesn’t consider, because it’s about math. So tell me: what happens when a water’s volume increases? That’s right, very good. The water becomes heavier. Because there’s more of it. Need proof? Here’s an experiment for you to conduct: Pick up a 5-gallon jug of water. Now pick up a 1-gallon jug. Which is heavier?

So what happens when the water’s weight increases? Well, now we’re into geography, another part of the big picture. The heavier water pushes down on the ocean’s floor. Now, in some places, that will actually make the ocean deeper — sort of like when the bottom of a plastic dish bows outward. In other places, though, the heavier water won’t be able to actually move the floor, but will put tremendous pressure on it. TREMENDOUS pressure. And what happens when you put tremendous pressure on the earth’s crust?

That’s right, volcanoes. See, now we’re into volcanology, which teaches us that magma, which is produced by volcanoes, is earth’s building material. The pressure produced by the rising sea will force volcanic eruptions of magma to the surface, which in effect will create new land. So, even as the oceans are rising, land is rising, too. This is how planets get bigger, (and — see? — we’re into astrology now). Do you think the Earth was always this same size? No! Thousands upon thousands of years ago it was much smaller. There was also a lot less water. Now we have lots of water, and lots of land. A few thousand years from now, there will be even more of both. It’s the natural way of things. It’s science. SCIENCE. But not science studied in isolation. Science as part of the greater whole.

History is the story of a series of civilizations that each rose, thrived and eventually collapsed (mostly) because they had used changed and degraded their environment so much that their environment could not sustain them any longer. In time new civilization replaced the lost civilization in a different fresh, environment only to follow the same path as the others before it.We have now reached a point where the whole of humanity is one super civilization and the whole world it’s environment. All changes occur on a global scale. A collapse at this point would mean the collapse of humanity as a whole and there would be no recovery after this – there would be no place left unchanged on earth to start afresh. In many ways mankind is at it’s peak- we have made so many advances that those who lived before us would have considered us gods. We have also never been as close to doom as we are now.

You seem to read my thoughts! You are one of my FAVORITE commenters on the human condition.

There have been 6 mass extinctions already. The next one will involve democrats.

Excellent posts from the science professors.:D Thanks

Anybody know if there’s a hyperspace bypass in the works? I’m getting my towel & that handy book with the big, friendly letters spelling out “Don’t Panic!” just in case.