I don’t have time in the next several days to give your write-up the attention it deserves, but I hope to study it as a learning opportunity and to expand my grasp of general arguments around what I call steady-state climate change, that is, climate change without much contribution from tipping points this century and without strong impacts at even higher temperatures (eg., 3-4C). I appreciate the structure of your report, by the way, it lets a reader quickly drill down to sections of interest. It is clearly written.
At the moment, I am considering your analysis of permafrost and methane contributions to GAST changes. I have a larger number for total carbon in permafrost than you, 1.5Tt carbon, but now have to go through references to reconcile that number with yours. Your mention of an analysis from USGS deserves a read through articles from the reference you gave, and I am attempting that now.
There are several parameters involved (only some independent), to do with:
source type (anearobic decomposition, free gas deposit, methane hydrate dissolution),
source size,
source depth and layering,
rate of release (obviously dependent on other parameters)
geographic location (gulf of mexico versus arctic ice shelf),
temperature gradient (at a location),
water column height (near-shore vs slope),
in deciding whether methane (edit:carbon in methane) reaches the atmosphere as methane, carbon dioxide, or not at all, and over what time period.
The significance of field observations over the last 10 years, and differences between particular regions (eg, Arctic seas), should be taken into account. Before reviewing counterarguments, I tend to take specialist claims about conclusions that factor in these parameters uncritically, but now that you’ve mentioned one parameter, aerobic bacteria acting on methane, as implying conclusions contrary to mine, I should delve deeper into how these parameters interact.
If you want to offer a comment about Greenland’s ice sheet, and its potential contribution to sea level rise this century, I am curious to check sources with you and do more reconciling (or at least partitioning) of references. I’ve seen reports that changes to Greenland’s ice sheet are accelerating and lead to estimates of sea level rise that are higher than, say 50 cm, more like meters, actually, over the next 80 years, but would like to know more from you.
In general, my observation is strong drivers of change to specific tipping points haven’t found their way into climate models used by the IPCC (for example, physical processes driving some Greenland ice melt). They might at some point.
BTW, I did take a read through the comments here, and consider the the mentions of analyses of systemic and cascading risks to be useful. I hope you won’t object if I ask a few questions about those risks, just to understand your perspective on those models. However, if you consider those questions to be out of scope or not of interest, let me know, and I’ll hold off.
(Just noting that I’m not ignoring your comments about methane clathrates, but I don’t think you were asking for a response there, but were instead just highlighting some issues for you to look into? Correct me if I’m wrong)
Yes I note that there is deep uncertainty about sea level rise once warming passes 3ºC and that sea level rise might be much higher than estimated. I discuss the impacts this might have in the sea level rise section and the economic costs section
I agree that many specific tipping points haven’t made their way into IPCC models
About 1 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost.325
and you include the footnote:
325 “The new northern permafrost zone carbon inventory reports the surface permafrost carbon pool (0–3 m) to be 1,035 ±150 Pg carbon (mean ±95% confidence interval, CI).” E. a. G. Schuur et al.,‘Climate Change and the Permafrost Carbon Feedback’, Nature 520, no. 7546 (April 2015): 171–79,https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14338.
In the Nature paper you cited for a listing of permafrost carbon, you find the following quote on the same page as lists total carbon in the top 3 meters of permafrost. I list the geographic regions in braces for clarity:
Taken together, the known pool of terrestrial permafrost carbon in the northern permafrost zone is 1,330–1,580 Pg carbon, accounting for surface carbon as well as deep carbon in the yedoma region [in Siberia and Alaska] and [Arctic] river deltas, with the potential for 400 Pg carbon in other deep terrestrial permafrost sediments that, along with an additional quantity of subsea permafrost carbon, still remains largely unquantified.
So a total amount of carbon in permafrost between 1730-1980 Pg, or 1.73-1.98 trillion tonnes of carbon, not the 1 trillion tonnes you list. This is typically described as being twice the carbon currently in the atmosphere, but how quickly it causes heating given some rate of thaw depends on whether it is released as methane or carbon dioxide. As you know, methane has 100X the heating potential of carbon dioxide, but that drops off rapidly over a couple decades, so rate of release is very important.
If you look elsewhere for amounts, you find the usual figure listed is 1.5Tt for total carbon in permafrost. I think that represents updates to estimates but have not looked into it in detail. A slight rephrase of your sentence “About 1 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost.” to either mention the top 3 meters of soil explicitly for the trillion tonnes number or to use some figure closer to 1.5Tt (NOAA’s mid-range for total northern permafrost). will bring the announced total closer to what people typically mean by total carbon in permafrost, just the permafrost in the North.
Earlier in the same Nature paper, you read:
Deeper carbon measurements were initially rare, and it was not even possible to quantify the uncertainty for the permafrost carbon pool size estimate. However, important new syntheses continue to report large quantities of deep carbon preserved in permafrost at many previously unsampled locations, and that a substantial fraction of this deep permafrost carbon is susceptible to future thaw15. The permafrost carbon pool is now thought to comprise organic carbon in the top 3 m of surface soil, carbon in deposits deeper than 3 m (including those within the yedoma region, an area of deep sediment deposits that cover unglaciated parts of Siberia and Alaska16–18), as well as carbon within permafrost that formed on land during glacial periods but that is now found on shallow submarine shelves in the Arctic.
For the reference you cite, it’s clear that carbon deeper than 3m is considered “susceptible to future thaw”, and so is relevant to discussions of permafrost contribution to global warming. In fact, some existing examples of that thaw are mentioned in that 2015 paper.
I think there are numerous taking off points for discussion of the effects of permafrost thaw aside from the box 5.1 sections of the IPCC technical report that you cite.
The parameters deciding the effects of permafrost include:
abrupt vs gradual release of carbon
carbon release as methane (CH4) vs carbon dioxide (CO2)
geological shaping of ice and organic matter within permafrost
release of ancient microbes (bacteria, viruses) and others (anthrax, smallpox) in the soil
subsidence rates (causing effects on current or future infrastructure)
biophysical rates of change to permafrost (ground fires and microbial action)
stored chemical release on permafrost lands (sump chemicals, other chemicals)
if you decide that you want to expand on those in a later version of your research.
EDIT: I included some light edits to this to make my comment more clear. Also I would love to discuss more of the topics you raise in your research report, including the models suggesting different levels of contribution from carbon release from permafrost.
I noticed this quote at the end of the box highlight on “Permafrost Carbon and Feedbacks to Climate” in Chapter 5 of the IPCC Technical Report that you cite:
In conclusion, thawing terrestrial permafrost will lead to carbon release under a warmer world (high confidence). However, there is low confidence on the timing, magnitude and linearity of the permafrost climate feedback owing to the wide range of published estimates and the incomplete knowledge and representation in models of drivers and relationships.
And this is why considering the highs and lows in a bit of depth is worth doing.
It is projected that CO2 released from permafrost will be 18 (3.1–41) PgC /°C by 2100, with the relative contribution of CO2 vs CH4 remaining poorly constrained. Permafrost carbon feedbacks are included among the under-represented feedbacks quantified in Figure 5.29.
Those projections, if we accept them as accurate, do not address nonlinear release of carbon, particularly as Methane. That leaves it to you to summarize expected heating over the short term of an abrupt release of carbon involving significant amounts of CH4. As I wrote, CH4 has 100X the heating potential of CO2 but over the longer term of a century, that drops to 25X.
Would abrupt release of a large amount of CH4 create a jump in average temperature of 1-2C? What would the impact of that be? How would it amplify other feedbacks and with what consequences for humanity, give that the effect is temporary?
Your report could address those questions with more interest than it does.
Right, I wasn’t looking for a response about methane, more just excitedly listing, I guess. My motivated thinking, going in, is that there’s plenty of exposed methane hydrates and free methane on shallow parts of the continental shelves exposed to much warmer waters in the Arctic and Siberia. A Nature paper from Ruppel is a bit old, and includes discussion of deeper deposits in warmer waters much further south. The paper does make exceptions for shallower deposits, as in the Arctic sea. She notes technical difficulties in resolving the origin of the methane even in those cases, but there’s been efforts to resolve the questions since then. A later Reviews Of Geophysics paper confronts predictions about sources and distributions.I have to dig into that.
Carolyn Ruppel is also a proponent of drilling undersea methane for fuel, and has been for the last decade. Treatment of the melting arctic as a tipping point seems politically unpopular, now that various projected benefits of its melt have been identified. We can drill for natural gas or oil, fish, establish shipping lanes, or fight over sovereignty up there, but I’m not seeing much government attention on the ice-free Arctic as an actual climate problem.
Still, Ruppel holds an important position, and I will give her research more attention now. Thank you.
Yes, as far as sea level rise, I read the sections you mentioned, thank you. The West Antarctic is less of an immediate concern than Greenland, so I am puzzled why you haven’t mentioned Greenland explicitly. Your discussion of sea level rise doesn’t include Greenland’s contribution, but Greenland will melt before the West Antarctic, and it holds several meters of sea level rise in its ice. I believe that Greenland’s melt could shutdown the AMOC as well.
I think processes like fires on permafrost land go ignored in models of permafrost thaw, just like lubrication of the bottom of Greenland Ice goes ignored. Some discussions about climate change suggest that people move north, but north into areas of melting permafrost? That seems dubious.
Anyway, thanks again, I’ll come back to you with whatever I actually conclude once I compare the two points of view that I have on arctic methane:
dangerous tipping point
harmless, possibly irrelevant, source of natural gas
Thanks, I’m actually surprised that members of the community have such energy around its concerns about the quality of climate change scholarship. I didn’t expect that that the OP would generate these concerns.
I posted a radical opinion about climate change here some time back that got a few downvotes and almost no readers. Basically, I think global warming is now self-amplifying. Anyway, I don’t mind the lack of interest, it wasn’t scholarly work.
The meta comments are about research process, how best to represent differing viewpoints, and whether John gave fair weight to considerations outside the point of view that John holds. I don’t have a comment here, I think I’ll take what was given as where to start my own learning efforts.
What I would like from others who post here is more engagement around specific scenarios of risk. From my review of comments made in discussions of climate change, the obstacle seems to be lack of commitment to the plausibility of specific scenarios.
So for example, a discussion of a multi-breadbasket failure would include a few sentences about how our civilization would respond by choosing to grow its own food, eg., in cities. I would like to see someone work that through. We’re talking about locally producing calorie-dense sources of carbohydrates and proteins in a situation in which grain stocks become limited worldwide. Vegies on your windowsill won’t do the job. More generally, there’s a question about stocks vs flows, we have some grain reserves, but how much, and how should they be managed in case of what percentage of global crop failures? George Monbiot has some conclusions (hint, he wants to use some old NASA tech), I’m looking forward to reading his work. Then there’s the reason for failure. Hurricanes inundating low-lying farm areas (like Vietnam) would have a longer impact on soil productivity than would a 6-week heat wave, or would it?
Another example would be how we handle internal and global migration, given some specific scenario. For example, a famine and water shortage in Bangladesh during a heat wave inducing power outages and heat stress enough to kill people. What does an altruistic response to that situation look like?
In any prediction where the claim goes, “It would be very bad if....”, there’s usually a discussion of 100′s of millions of deaths. What does that mean? Do they die in place, suddenly, or was there a predictable build-up but no response for a long time? I see this happening with a multi-breadbasket failure, there’s hardly anyone working to prevent this scenario in realtime. There’s one UN organization, a small one, and then there’s ALLfed, who seem to be focused on Nuclear Winter. And how long is realtime? There’s supposed to be a network coordinated from the UN that tracks when a global famine is looming and arranges stocks and flows to prevent the worst of it. Are they funded and effective?
I have also noticed a lack of interest in the states about the impacts of small heat waves elsewhere, for example, China’s recent heat wave. But these tiny examples are a good start for creating predictions. People fried eggs on city stones for fun over there (yes, the heat island effect). Bridges buckled from heat, and their hydroelectric dams are dry. The immediate predictions, sadly, are just focused on their GDP. There’s not much good prediction work to explain what happens if their water and hydropower shortage continue. I know only a little, that different geographic regions have different levels of dependency on hydropower. But the industries effected are critical to some sections of the global economy, and their shutdown, long-term, should be a concern for the economics-minded. Will they turn to coal to make up the difference and does it matter (coal, btw, has an interesting silver lining, the aerosol effect)?
Then there’s Britain’s recent heat wave, and the heat wave in the Northwest of the US a few years ago. All quite odd, linked to the meandering jet stream. The rain on Greenland’s summit, another anomaly, which sets a new precedent for Greenland melt. We don’t want an atmospheric river dumping on Greenland for days on end.
Then there’s the recent prediction of a historical flood of California, a recurring event, but worsened by climate change.
Yes, so there’s plenty to start from, and when building a scenario, you can take what’s happened, make it worse, and make it last longer or occur repeatedly. Use that to explain why climate change is bad. Conversely, to reject climate change as a catastrophic risk, explain how we go about handling these difficult situations successfully, in time to prevent risks like the deaths of 100′s of millions of people. I would like to read some of those rejections.
Thanks for mentioning ALLFED. We do tend to focus on nuclear winter, including with NASA tech like hydrogen single cell protein. However, a lot of the foods we research are relevant to climate catastrophes such as multiple breadbasket failure, including seaweed.
Yes, the protein production technology is certainly relevant. I don’t think the seaweed is unless you are confident that it would survive various changes in ocean temperature, acidity, pollutant levels, flora, and fauna that progress with climate change. What do your models say?
What geographic range would growth of the seaweed serve depending on what forms of food transport? Is the use of seaweed as a food source likely restricted to the coasts and coastal populations?
Seaweed can be dried and transported long distances. It can also be used for reducing climate change, including sequestering CO2 and reducing methane emissions of cattle.
Can it be grown in tanks? I think fallout from a nuclear war would contaminate all open areas used for agriculture, including the oceans, for example, from fallout on winds, dust, rain (if there is any?), or water contamination carried on ocean currents. Do your models suggest that agriculture and aquaculture and use of open areas is a strong contamination risk or no?
There was an algae-based oil called Thrive, totally monounsaturated, if I remember right, that until recently was commercially available. I used it several times and liked it as a salad oil.
Seaweed can be grown in tanks, and so can microalgae. But from what I’ve seen, the cost is significantly higher in tanks. Radioactive contamination is a concern, especially in target countries. But it is likely not the most important concern, as Hiroshima was continuously inhabited. Radioactive contamination would be diluted in the oceans, so I think seaweed would be better than land crops in this regard.
Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts. I have a few more questions:
1. If you can find the research about seaweed growth in lower-pH conditions with heat waves in nearshore waters, and changes in nutrient availability (probably declines), I want to know more. I think seaweed might be a good near-term choice of replacement agriculture in the next 10-20 years, but during that time, it makes sense that the world scale up the kinds of food sources that you and ALLFED explore.
2. I like dextrose monohydrate, as a food product, it’s widely available and dissolves clean in water. With flavoring and in combination with whey (and of course casein, but I really favor whey), it makes a replacement milk. I understand that anhydrous dextrose has different properties in foods. What form of dextrose would paper mills produce? Are you more thinking something with less sweetness, like maltodextrin (also a possibility in a milk substitute)? Could the mills produce different types of carbs?
3. Assuming a 2400 kcal diet, what are your targets for macronutrients? Given a source of concentrated carbohydrates, people need a protein source, a fat source, and additional sources of minerals and vitamins and other compounds. I lik carbs (510g-450g), proteins (40g-100g), and an EFA source (1g-10g), but that’s just me. Adding in fats, you need to choose a carb minimum, as I think the trade-off would be carbs for fats, not proteins for fats. There’s a variety of reasons to choose different kcalorie totals and macronutrient balances, do you have a list of your criteria and final decisions or have you looked into that in detail?
4. Have you looked into the manufacture of: * individual essential amino acids? * essential fatty acids? * vitamin and mineral supplements?
5. Based on UN studies, there’s a lower limit on protein consumption that maintains protein balance in a person[1]. Has ALLFED chosen a minimum daily human EAA requirements, per kg bodyweight, and something similar for children?
6. With the dried seaweed you mentioned, how do you prepare it, or what sort of food products can you prepare with it? With dextrose, the easiest choices are sweet treats. What do you do with the seaweed?
7. I suspect that in a time of crisis like a multi-breadbasket failure, both refrigeration and heating (cooking) are lacking resources for transport and storage. Therefore, ability to store food for long periods without spoiling is important. Dried foods or powders work the best there[2]. If it were me, I’d choose carb+ protein powders and vacuum-sealed EFA plus vitamin/mineral supplementation powder. How does your modeling and knowledge differ from my conclusions?
Given different food sources of proteins, and differences in absorption from those sources, as well as balance of aminos present in those foods, people require more or less food to meet their EAA requirements. This is actually an important argument against the use of natural food vegan protein sources available globally, because although total protein requirements are easily met by local food sources, EAA requirements are much to meet without the addition of milk or meat, unless you rely on soy. I don’t object to soy in the diet, but in terms of environmental footprint required to meet human EAA requirements, vegan diets might be a concern if they don’t include soy. Of course you know that individual EAAs cannot be substituted for each other.
I think supplementation of manufactured foods with aminos would serve for countries with less access to milk or meat. So EAA’s to bring foods into balance with ideal EAA profiles, and individual amino acids like glutamine that have higher metabolic demand. Ajinomoto corporation does use aminos as a food additive and animal feed suppliers do this with animal feed but most amino acids taste terrible, except for lysine, glutamine, and maybe a few others. Some people like glycine but I do not like the taste.
Hi, John.
I don’t have time in the next several days to give your write-up the attention it deserves, but I hope to study it as a learning opportunity and to expand my grasp of general arguments around what I call steady-state climate change, that is, climate change without much contribution from tipping points this century and without strong impacts at even higher temperatures (eg., 3-4C). I appreciate the structure of your report, by the way, it lets a reader quickly drill down to sections of interest. It is clearly written.
At the moment, I am considering your analysis of permafrost and methane contributions to GAST changes. I have a larger number for total carbon in permafrost than you, 1.5Tt carbon, but now have to go through references to reconcile that number with yours. Your mention of an analysis from USGS deserves a read through articles from the reference you gave, and I am attempting that now.
There are several parameters involved (only some independent), to do with:
source type (anearobic decomposition, free gas deposit, methane hydrate dissolution),
source size,
source depth and layering,
rate of release (obviously dependent on other parameters)
geographic location (gulf of mexico versus arctic ice shelf),
temperature gradient (at a location),
water column height (near-shore vs slope),
in deciding whether methane (edit:carbon in methane) reaches the atmosphere as methane, carbon dioxide, or not at all, and over what time period.
The significance of field observations over the last 10 years, and differences between particular regions (eg, Arctic seas), should be taken into account. Before reviewing counterarguments, I tend to take specialist claims about conclusions that factor in these parameters uncritically, but now that you’ve mentioned one parameter, aerobic bacteria acting on methane, as implying conclusions contrary to mine, I should delve deeper into how these parameters interact.
If you want to offer a comment about Greenland’s ice sheet, and its potential contribution to sea level rise this century, I am curious to check sources with you and do more reconciling (or at least partitioning) of references. I’ve seen reports that changes to Greenland’s ice sheet are accelerating and lead to estimates of sea level rise that are higher than, say 50 cm, more like meters, actually, over the next 80 years, but would like to know more from you.
In general, my observation is strong drivers of change to specific tipping points haven’t found their way into climate models used by the IPCC (for example, physical processes driving some Greenland ice melt). They might at some point.
BTW, I did take a read through the comments here, and consider the the mentions of analyses of systemic and cascading risks to be useful. I hope you won’t object if I ask a few questions about those risks, just to understand your perspective on those models. However, if you consider those questions to be out of scope or not of interest, let me know, and I’ll hold off.
Thank you.
Hi Noah,
(Just noting that I’m not ignoring your comments about methane clathrates, but I don’t think you were asking for a response there, but were instead just highlighting some issues for you to look into? Correct me if I’m wrong)
Yes I note that there is deep uncertainty about sea level rise once warming passes 3ºC and that sea level rise might be much higher than estimated. I discuss the impacts this might have in the sea level rise section and the economic costs section
I agree that many specific tipping points haven’t made their way into IPCC models
Hi, John.
In your research report, you wrote:
and you include the footnote:
In the Nature paper you cited for a listing of permafrost carbon, you find the following quote on the same page as lists total carbon in the top 3 meters of permafrost. I list the geographic regions in braces for clarity:
So a total amount of carbon in permafrost between 1730-1980 Pg, or 1.73-1.98 trillion tonnes of carbon, not the 1 trillion tonnes you list. This is typically described as being twice the carbon currently in the atmosphere, but how quickly it causes heating given some rate of thaw depends on whether it is released as methane or carbon dioxide. As you know, methane has 100X the heating potential of carbon dioxide, but that drops off rapidly over a couple decades, so rate of release is very important.
If you look elsewhere for amounts, you find the usual figure listed is 1.5Tt for total carbon in permafrost. I think that represents updates to estimates but have not looked into it in detail. A slight rephrase of your sentence “About 1 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost.” to either mention the top 3 meters of soil explicitly for the trillion tonnes number or to use some figure closer to 1.5Tt (NOAA’s mid-range for total northern permafrost). will bring the announced total closer to what people typically mean by total carbon in permafrost, just the permafrost in the North.
Earlier in the same Nature paper, you read:
For the reference you cite, it’s clear that carbon deeper than 3m is considered “susceptible to future thaw”, and so is relevant to discussions of permafrost contribution to global warming. In fact, some existing examples of that thaw are mentioned in that 2015 paper.
I think there are numerous taking off points for discussion of the effects of permafrost thaw aside from the box 5.1 sections of the IPCC technical report that you cite.
The parameters deciding the effects of permafrost include:
abrupt vs gradual release of carbon
carbon release as methane (CH4) vs carbon dioxide (CO2)
geological shaping of ice and organic matter within permafrost
release of ancient microbes (bacteria, viruses) and others (anthrax, smallpox) in the soil
subsidence rates (causing effects on current or future infrastructure)
biophysical rates of change to permafrost (ground fires and microbial action)
stored chemical release on permafrost lands (sump chemicals, other chemicals)
if you decide that you want to expand on those in a later version of your research.
EDIT: I included some light edits to this to make my comment more clear. Also I would love to discuss more of the topics you raise in your research report, including the models suggesting different levels of contribution from carbon release from permafrost.
I noticed this quote at the end of the box highlight on “Permafrost Carbon and Feedbacks to Climate” in Chapter 5 of the IPCC Technical Report that you cite:
And this is why considering the highs and lows in a bit of depth is worth doing.
Those projections, if we accept them as accurate, do not address nonlinear release of carbon, particularly as Methane. That leaves it to you to summarize expected heating over the short term of an abrupt release of carbon involving significant amounts of CH4. As I wrote, CH4 has 100X the heating potential of CO2 but over the longer term of a century, that drops to 25X.
Would abrupt release of a large amount of CH4 create a jump in average temperature of 1-2C? What would the impact of that be? How would it amplify other feedbacks and with what consequences for humanity, give that the effect is temporary?
Your report could address those questions with more interest than it does.
Right, I wasn’t looking for a response about methane, more just excitedly listing, I guess. My motivated thinking, going in, is that there’s plenty of exposed methane hydrates and free methane on shallow parts of the continental shelves exposed to much warmer waters in the Arctic and Siberia. A Nature paper from Ruppel is a bit old, and includes discussion of deeper deposits in warmer waters much further south. The paper does make exceptions for shallower deposits, as in the Arctic sea. She notes technical difficulties in resolving the origin of the methane even in those cases, but there’s been efforts to resolve the questions since then. A later Reviews Of Geophysics paper confronts predictions about sources and distributions.I have to dig into that.
Carolyn Ruppel is also a proponent of drilling undersea methane for fuel, and has been for the last decade. Treatment of the melting arctic as a tipping point seems politically unpopular, now that various projected benefits of its melt have been identified. We can drill for natural gas or oil, fish, establish shipping lanes, or fight over sovereignty up there, but I’m not seeing much government attention on the ice-free Arctic as an actual climate problem.
Still, Ruppel holds an important position, and I will give her research more attention now. Thank you.
Yes, as far as sea level rise, I read the sections you mentioned, thank you. The West Antarctic is less of an immediate concern than Greenland, so I am puzzled why you haven’t mentioned Greenland explicitly. Your discussion of sea level rise doesn’t include Greenland’s contribution, but Greenland will melt before the West Antarctic, and it holds several meters of sea level rise in its ice. I believe that Greenland’s melt could shutdown the AMOC as well.
I think processes like fires on permafrost land go ignored in models of permafrost thaw, just like lubrication of the bottom of Greenland Ice goes ignored. Some discussions about climate change suggest that people move north, but north into areas of melting permafrost? That seems dubious.
Anyway, thanks again, I’ll come back to you with whatever I actually conclude once I compare the two points of view that I have on arctic methane:
dangerous tipping point
harmless, possibly irrelevant, source of natural gas
Strongly upvoted.
Usually I would’ve given a regular upvote, but I think this should be highlighted above the meta comments and flame wars.
Thanks, I’m actually surprised that members of the community have such energy around its concerns about the quality of climate change scholarship. I didn’t expect that that the OP would generate these concerns.
I posted a radical opinion about climate change here some time back that got a few downvotes and almost no readers. Basically, I think global warming is now self-amplifying. Anyway, I don’t mind the lack of interest, it wasn’t scholarly work.
The meta comments are about research process, how best to represent differing viewpoints, and whether John gave fair weight to considerations outside the point of view that John holds. I don’t have a comment here, I think I’ll take what was given as where to start my own learning efforts.
What I would like from others who post here is more engagement around specific scenarios of risk. From my review of comments made in discussions of climate change, the obstacle seems to be lack of commitment to the plausibility of specific scenarios.
So for example, a discussion of a multi-breadbasket failure would include a few sentences about how our civilization would respond by choosing to grow its own food, eg., in cities. I would like to see someone work that through. We’re talking about locally producing calorie-dense sources of carbohydrates and proteins in a situation in which grain stocks become limited worldwide. Vegies on your windowsill won’t do the job. More generally, there’s a question about stocks vs flows, we have some grain reserves, but how much, and how should they be managed in case of what percentage of global crop failures? George Monbiot has some conclusions (hint, he wants to use some old NASA tech), I’m looking forward to reading his work. Then there’s the reason for failure. Hurricanes inundating low-lying farm areas (like Vietnam) would have a longer impact on soil productivity than would a 6-week heat wave, or would it?
Another example would be how we handle internal and global migration, given some specific scenario. For example, a famine and water shortage in Bangladesh during a heat wave inducing power outages and heat stress enough to kill people. What does an altruistic response to that situation look like?
In any prediction where the claim goes, “It would be very bad if....”, there’s usually a discussion of 100′s of millions of deaths. What does that mean? Do they die in place, suddenly, or was there a predictable build-up but no response for a long time? I see this happening with a multi-breadbasket failure, there’s hardly anyone working to prevent this scenario in realtime. There’s one UN organization, a small one, and then there’s ALLfed, who seem to be focused on Nuclear Winter. And how long is realtime? There’s supposed to be a network coordinated from the UN that tracks when a global famine is looming and arranges stocks and flows to prevent the worst of it. Are they funded and effective?
I have also noticed a lack of interest in the states about the impacts of small heat waves elsewhere, for example, China’s recent heat wave. But these tiny examples are a good start for creating predictions. People fried eggs on city stones for fun over there (yes, the heat island effect). Bridges buckled from heat, and their hydroelectric dams are dry. The immediate predictions, sadly, are just focused on their GDP. There’s not much good prediction work to explain what happens if their water and hydropower shortage continue. I know only a little, that different geographic regions have different levels of dependency on hydropower. But the industries effected are critical to some sections of the global economy, and their shutdown, long-term, should be a concern for the economics-minded. Will they turn to coal to make up the difference and does it matter (coal, btw, has an interesting silver lining, the aerosol effect)?
Then there’s Britain’s recent heat wave, and the heat wave in the Northwest of the US a few years ago. All quite odd, linked to the meandering jet stream. The rain on Greenland’s summit, another anomaly, which sets a new precedent for Greenland melt. We don’t want an atmospheric river dumping on Greenland for days on end.
Then there’s the recent prediction of a historical flood of California, a recurring event, but worsened by climate change.
Yes, so there’s plenty to start from, and when building a scenario, you can take what’s happened, make it worse, and make it last longer or occur repeatedly. Use that to explain why climate change is bad. Conversely, to reject climate change as a catastrophic risk, explain how we go about handling these difficult situations successfully, in time to prevent risks like the deaths of 100′s of millions of people. I would like to read some of those rejections.
Thanks for mentioning ALLFED. We do tend to focus on nuclear winter, including with NASA tech like hydrogen single cell protein. However, a lot of the foods we research are relevant to climate catastrophes such as multiple breadbasket failure, including seaweed.
Yes, the protein production technology is certainly relevant. I don’t think the seaweed is unless you are confident that it would survive various changes in ocean temperature, acidity, pollutant levels, flora, and fauna that progress with climate change. What do your models say?
We have not modeled seaweed growth in a warming world, but I believe others have. I expect that species would need to move to higher latitudes, as they would need to move to lower latitudes in the case of nuclear winter.
What geographic range would growth of the seaweed serve depending on what forms of food transport? Is the use of seaweed as a food source likely restricted to the coasts and coastal populations?
Seaweed can be dried and transported long distances. It can also be used for reducing climate change, including sequestering CO2 and reducing methane emissions of cattle.
Can it be grown in tanks? I think fallout from a nuclear war would contaminate all open areas used for agriculture, including the oceans, for example, from fallout on winds, dust, rain (if there is any?), or water contamination carried on ocean currents. Do your models suggest that agriculture and aquaculture and use of open areas is a strong contamination risk or no?
In the case of climate change, the major shifts are in pH, local heat, currents, and ecology. I suspect strong climate change will require tank growth of seaweed, if any. There are global models of ocean pH change. I think pH is lower at the poles while absolute water temps near the coasts will be higher at the equator.
There was an algae-based oil called Thrive, totally monounsaturated, if I remember right, that until recently was commercially available. I used it several times and liked it as a salad oil.
Seaweed can be grown in tanks, and so can microalgae. But from what I’ve seen, the cost is significantly higher in tanks. Radioactive contamination is a concern, especially in target countries. But it is likely not the most important concern, as Hiroshima was continuously inhabited. Radioactive contamination would be diluted in the oceans, so I think seaweed would be better than land crops in this regard.
Hi, Dr. Denkenberger
Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts. I have a few more questions:
1. If you can find the research about seaweed growth in lower-pH conditions with heat waves in nearshore waters, and changes in nutrient availability (probably declines), I want to know more. I think seaweed might be a good near-term choice of replacement agriculture in the next 10-20 years, but during that time, it makes sense that the world scale up the kinds of food sources that you and ALLFED explore.
2. I like dextrose monohydrate, as a food product, it’s widely available and dissolves clean in water. With flavoring and in combination with whey (and of course casein, but I really favor whey), it makes a replacement milk. I understand that anhydrous dextrose has different properties in foods. What form of dextrose would paper mills produce? Are you more thinking something with less sweetness, like maltodextrin (also a possibility in a milk substitute)? Could the mills produce different types of carbs?
3. Assuming a 2400 kcal diet, what are your targets for macronutrients? Given a source of concentrated carbohydrates, people need a protein source, a fat source, and additional sources of minerals and vitamins and other compounds. I lik carbs (510g-450g), proteins (40g-100g), and an EFA source (1g-10g), but that’s just me. Adding in fats, you need to choose a carb minimum, as I think the trade-off would be carbs for fats, not proteins for fats.
There’s a variety of reasons to choose different kcalorie totals and macronutrient balances, do you have a list of your criteria and final decisions or have you looked into that in detail?
4. Have you looked into the manufacture of:
* individual essential amino acids?
* essential fatty acids?
* vitamin and mineral supplements?
5. Based on UN studies, there’s a lower limit on protein consumption that maintains protein balance in a person[1]. Has ALLFED chosen a minimum daily human EAA requirements, per kg bodyweight, and something similar for children?
6. With the dried seaweed you mentioned, how do you prepare it, or what sort of food products can you prepare with it? With dextrose, the easiest choices are sweet treats. What do you do with the seaweed?
7. I suspect that in a time of crisis like a multi-breadbasket failure, both refrigeration and heating (cooking) are lacking resources for transport and storage. Therefore, ability to store food for long periods without spoiling is important. Dried foods or powders work the best there[2]. If it were me, I’d choose carb+ protein powders and vacuum-sealed EFA plus vitamin/mineral supplementation powder. How does your modeling and knowledge differ from my conclusions?
Given different food sources of proteins, and differences in absorption from those sources, as well as balance of aminos present in those foods, people require more or less food to meet their EAA requirements. This is actually an important argument against the use of natural food vegan protein sources available globally, because although total protein requirements are easily met by local food sources, EAA requirements are much to meet without the addition of milk or meat, unless you rely on soy. I don’t object to soy in the diet, but in terms of environmental footprint required to meet human EAA requirements, vegan diets might be a concern if they don’t include soy. Of course you know that individual EAAs cannot be substituted for each other.
I think supplementation of manufactured foods with aminos would serve for countries with less access to milk or meat. So EAA’s to bring foods into balance with ideal EAA profiles, and individual amino acids like glutamine that have higher metabolic demand. Ajinomoto corporation does use aminos as a food additive and animal feed suppliers do this with animal feed but most amino acids taste terrible, except for lysine, glutamine, and maybe a few others. Some people like glycine but I do not like the taste.