Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about climate change and CO2 levels is that it’s not the level so much as the rate. We’re on the path to doubling (or have doubled if you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn’t have ice caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.
Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.
So it’s pretty clear we need to adopt solar radiation management r&d asap. Because that is the only feasible way we will stabilize the heat balance in the next few decades.
The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.
But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!
I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine doing anything effective about this.
The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.
What is the temporal resolution of the ice cores or whatever else is being used to measure when the last “hot house” periods were? Because today we are measuring CO2 with minute-level resolution. But I feel like an ice core might be a year at best, probably much worse. Which if I’m right would mean we really don’t know how fast or slow we entered into the last hot period (the rate)
The Amazon forest is unique in many ways but most importantly because unlike other forests, it CANNOT grow back. The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch. The forest is sustained by the rain it creates from itself. Once the trees are gone, the water will be gone. [1] We also have reasons to think this self-sustaining climate is going to collapse soon [2]
So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
> The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene epoch.
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I’ve seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and don’t cycle through water like the rain forest would. We’ll also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to completely different global rainfall patterns than we know today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me, but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns that helps the Amazon
Global warming will not reforest the planet with a substantially different biosphere to set the conditions for the Amazon to regrow and then persist.
I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
My understanding is very challenging for a few reasons.
1. A forest is not just a bunch of trees. It’s most healthy and robust with mature trees and right animal life that supports and propagates them
2. The short term economic incentives towards rehabilitating the forest aren’t there and are actively counter productive for soy and beef farming
3. It might already be past a tipping point as some parts of the forest are dying out and setting on fire through natural causes. The Amazon rainforest is NOT an ecosystem that is used to burning and it cannot recover from it since it destroys the ground cover and soils rainforest plants depend on to grow. Plants that like wet conditions need wet conditions to prosper, dusty charred clay ain’t that
In 2023 there was also massive fires in Canada covering a similar area, 2021 Siberia, in 2019/2020 in Australia, 2015 in Indonesia (peat fires, less area but similar emissions)... there is a long list of extended fires with weighty emissions all in the last decade that nullifies and add a big share to every trial of forestation as natural carbon capture method. And things will get worse as that is in part a positive feedback loop.
Australia has long had fires. Fires are an integral part of Australia’s historic natural environment.
So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los Angeles.
The 2019–2020 fires were so hot that eucalyptus trees actually struggled to reproduce. Trees with pyrophilic seeds that normally like a good scorching were instead totally consumed by the fires, and the soil got so hot that seeds already dropped and buried were burned to death. Trees that store energy in their wood (either underground or shielded by bark) got so hot that their normally safe wood burned.
Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.
Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.
I’m not meaning that ocasional/limited forest fires can or not be healthy for forest. Just that the mentioned ones were all record breaking, and had a significant contribution to long lasting CO2 in the atmosphere, all of them were in similar orders than the 2024 fires.
And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.
> The Amazon contributing 741 ± 61 teragram of carbon-its highest level since 2000 and more than half of the global fire emission anomaly. This surge, driven by exceptional heat and drought, offset two decades of declining deforestation emissions.
That's rough, whatever gains we thought we made, puff gone. The next sentence paints us a picture of what the future holds. Many of us are going to be here for pretty drastic events I could imagine.
We need to halt the AI rollout and focus on using engineering talent to help make sure afforestation works and forests conditions are monitored carefully. We need to make sure that the forests we have can be sustained and the carbon we have emitted can be successfully sequestered back into the forest.
Most importantly we need to drastically change our consumption patterns to prevent emissions from continuing to rise.
As soon as we decarbonise we will see an imediate reduction in atmospheric CO² and global temperatures will follow quickly.
Given how bad and likely some of the failure modes of climate change are, decarbonisation is our only reasonable way forward that guarantees our continued technological progress as a species, vs a dark age.
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Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.
But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!
https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation...
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So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
[1]https://youtu.be/hb3b-A6QAc8
[2]https://www.nasa.gov/earth-and-climate/human-activities-are-...
[3]https://www.rainforesttrust.org
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
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I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
there are a few others in Brazil, like Biomas and Mombak
So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los Angeles.
Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.
Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.
And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.
That's rough, whatever gains we thought we made, puff gone. The next sentence paints us a picture of what the future holds. Many of us are going to be here for pretty drastic events I could imagine.
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Most importantly we need to drastically change our consumption patterns to prevent emissions from continuing to rise.
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And there it is, because when is this going to happen?
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