Comments on: NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe

By: Jerry Scovel

Jerry Scovel — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:44:18 +0000

Oddly enough if the ancient Romans and Persians had faced extensive droughts they would have built aqueducts to move exess water from areas of too much rainfall to storage cisterns in arid regions. The storage cisterns would release water slowly as needed. If we modern humans could build aqueducts from Greenland, Canada and Siberia to the Gobi, Sahara, Mojave et cetera we could use the pure water of the icepack to make the deserts bloom. The increase in plant life should be enough to reverse the carbon levels in the atmosphere.

By: Leif

Leif — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:57:34 +0000

Guest says: Wasn’t one of the consequences of Global Warming supposed to be a general increase in precipitations? Why are we talking of droughts here?

Wet can come in many forms. A whole bunch at once so as to cause floods and massive run off that is not only unuseable but dettermental. Happening…
Weather patterns can shift so that the moisture comes somewhere else or at the wrong time of the year. Happening… To name a couple. I have recently read a report by a Russian scientist that hypothesized that just removing sea side forests have a detrimental effect on further inland rainfall. Because the surface area for evaporation is so much greater in a forest than say the surface of the ocean, rain that falls in the forest is re-evaporated and redeposited further inland, instead of just falling in a narrow belt along the coast.
It makes a lot of sense to me.

By: AJ

AJ — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 23:36:59 +0000

I wonder when people like Greg will learn the basics of the carbon cycle and the feedbacks/CO2 absorption limitations therein. Or that this issue isn’t about what may have happened in the past under different circumstances, but about rapid change and it’s impacts on holocene ecology and a civilization of billions.

By: Greg G

Greg G — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:23:17 +0000

As mammals, a substantial period of our evolution was in the Jurassic period at 2000ppm CO2, and the Phanerozoic started out closer to 4000 ppm. The gases in each of our exhalations is close to 50,000 ppm.

CO2 at 300 ppm is due to a drawdown by plant life. Plant life will draw it back down. 1000 ppm by the end of the century? I’d take a bet against that if I knew I could be alive to collect.

By: Marc Barasch

Marc Barasch — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:50:07 +0000

Why not a crash program to plant an average of 10 billion trees a year for the next 10 years on degraded lands, restoring the ecology and economy of the world’s poorest places, and sucking up increasing volumes of carbon? I’m not so naive as to suggest it’s the solution, but it will certainly help, and on both a human and environmental level. The new chairman of the new White House Council on Science and Technology, Woods Hole scientist John Holdren, has announced that to ““accelerate afforestation and reforestation in all regions where this is practicable” is one of seven wedges to address climate change and “avoid catastrophe.” We have begun our own contribution to this effort at http://www.greenworld.org, which we conceive as massively scaleable. I would particularly appreciate scientific comment, either to poke holes or help me refine the argument. I believe this idea has a compelling logic, and have noted it is shared in at least some circles.

By: Asteroid Miner

Asteroid Miner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:48:19 +0000

Adaptation is almost entirely death and extinction. When you say: “We will adapt”, what you are really saying is: “We will willingly die and go extinct.” 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. Yet the maximum number of species alive at one time happened in about the year 1800. Adaptation is mostly extinction and the evolution of new species from the survivors. There is no reason to believe that Homo Sap would be among the survivors.

At the very least, adaptation means the fall of civilization. It isn’t just the southwest that could dry up. It could be the entire midwest, the farm belt. Reference “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas.
Downloaded from:
http://www.marklynas.org/ 2007/ 4/ 23/ six-steps-to-hell-summary-of-six-degrees-as-published-in-the-guardian
“Nebraska isn’t at the top of most tourists’ to-do lists. However, this dreary expanse of impossibly flat plains sits in the middle of one of the most productive agricultural systems on Earth. Beef and corn dominate the economy, and the Sand Hills region – where low, grassy hillocks rise up from the flatlands – has some of the best cattle ranching in the whole US. But scratch beneath the grass and you will find, as the name suggests, not soil but sand. These innocuous-looking hills were once desert, part of an immense system of sand dunes that spread across the Great Plains from Texas in the south to the Canadian prairies in the north. Six thousand years ago, when temperatures were about 1 [degree] C warmer than today in the US, these deserts may have looked much as the Sahara does today. As global warming bites, the western US could once again be plagued by perennial drought – devastating agriculture and driving out human inhabitants on a scale far larger than the 1930s “Dustbowl” exodus.”

Many “adaptationists” assume that we will have a century or more of gradual desertification in which we will be able to build a perfect irrigation system. There is no reason to believe that the desertification process will happen slowly enough to allow us to build irrigation systems to preserve our food supply. It didn’t happen that way in the 1930s. It could happen in one year, and we wouldn’t realize what had happened until there was no food to harvest in September. Irrigation doesn’t work for centuries in any case because irrigation gradually makes the soil too salty to grow crops.

Reference Book: “The Long Summer, How Climate Changed Civilization” by Brian Fagan, 2004 Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-02281-2
Summary: Smaller climate changes than we have caused already, caused the fall of dozens of civilizations. When there is no food, there is no civilization. Yes, the present civilization and the USA CAN collapse. Collapse means no more government, no more Americans, etc..

Reference Book: “Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond. 99.99% of all people in the collapsing civilization die, including the richest. Hunting the neighbors as food happens. We really don’t want to “adapt” that way. If you are reading this, you will be among the dead. The survivors are living in the stone age in some very out-of-the-way place.

“Adaptation” is out. We have to take the opposite path to maintain our civilization. We have to prevent any more global warming. If we don’t, the survivors will be stone age people, if there are any survivors.

By: TomG

TomG — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:20:15 +0000

One wet area that could get very dry, very quickly, is the Amazon forest.
It’s suffering a double whammy…AGW and massive deforestation.

By: Douglas Williamson

Douglas Williamson — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:32:55 +0000

I saw this article and relevant links on Grist and thought it might add some fuel to the fire of this discussion.

http://gristmill.grist.org/ story/ 2009/ 1/ 20/ 132011/ 193?source=weekly

It’s not so important that Bush and co. tanked the reports, but that the reports have been made and substantiate most of the pessimistic news about climate change.

By: Philip

Philip — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:09:48 +0000

Hmm, that link doesn’t seem to work, just google Joel Kotkin ‘Obama, Fight the Green Agenda’ published at Forbes.com today. Just an incredible specimen of disinformation that you might want to take a zoo trip to before it goes extinct.

By: Philip

Philip — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:05:03 +0000

I find it hard to think beyond 2100 because the scale of our culpability for the degradation and destruction that might occur scares me.

By the way, if anyone wants to read literally the worst article I have ever seen on climate, published by a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, go to…

http://www.forbes.com/ 2009/ 01/ 26/ green-climate-energy-oped-cx_jk_0127kotkin.html