jay pettitt on 3/10/2007 at 16:47

---

Hansen (NASA chap who's into gases and atmospheres and stuff) wrote (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2007/Hansen_etal_2.html) a paper for the Royal Society that somewhat disagrees. Broadly speaking he argues that warming will produce a whipsaw effect whereby the major ecological carbon sinks (oceans, peat bogs and the like) will start to release their stores of CO2 rather than absorbing it (~ positive feedback loops); after that we'll no longer have much influence and there's no real telling what climate we'll end up with other than it won't be the period of stability that allowed civilisation to happen - Hansen argues that there's no real reason to presuppose that earth won't end up about as hospitable to life as all the other planets we've ever looked, or for that matter as hospitable as earth itself has been for most of it's 'history'.

demagogue on 3/10/2007 at 18:40

---

Runaway global warming has happened many times in the past if you're looking on a geological scale. Anyway, it's a pretty standard theory now.

There's been pretty much the same amount of carbon somewhere on earth since the beginning, but a lot of it gets stored -- in the ground as hydrocarbons, in ice sheets, in seawater, in living trees -- and some of these stores are temperature sensitive ... melting ice, evaporating seas, burning forests ... so the two things tend to converge.

One thing, it's maybe not as helpful to think about "runaway warming" as a monolithic thing, but it's maybe better to think of each carbon store on its own terms (the burning forests and melting ice and evaporating seawater, etc). It's better from a policy perspective because maybe we can do something, e.g., about preserving forest stores from fires.

demagogue on 3/10/2007 at 18:59

---

@jay pettitt, just to be clear, your last post is responding to D'Juhn Keep, right? (I slipped in there.)

37637598 on 3/10/2007 at 20:14

---

People Google themselves all of the time! It's in human nature.

Rogue Keeper on 4/10/2007 at 07:28

---

I've heard this theory that it takes several decades for the climate to show full effects of gradually inceasing CO2 emissions, so in practice right now we experience full effects of emissions which have been produced in 1970s or 80s and full effect of our early 2000s will be noticeable in 2020s/30s.
It's beyond my modest understanding of complex atmospheric forces and mutual myriads climatic influences to judge whether this is right, partially right or just bollocks.



The planet may not give a fuck, yes. It's a simple slogan. But how about this : let's save the beautiful Holocene ecosystem which we belong to. Or what's left of it.