Is The World Getting Better Or Worse?

Carbon works in a cycle just like the water cycle. The world releases carbon into the atmosphere and absorbs it back out just to release more in a continuous loop. But instead of a few weeks like in the water cycle the carbon cycle takes centuries+.A carbon sink is a mechanism that absorbs atmospheric carbon. Trees, plants, oceans, etc. The various sinks *do* absorb all the carbon they can but when we keep cutting and burning the forests, paving over the grasslands and polluting the oceans we have limited the absorbing capacity to well below the huge amounts of carbon we add to the system each year.Planting a billion trees would help by offsetting the billions upon billions of trees being burned each year but not by much since those new trees have yet to grow and become effective sinks while we continue destroying even more mature trees. It takes many hundred millennia to grow an effective forest but, as we can see today in Brazil, just a few months to destroy one. The Brazilians are not just destroying one of our largest and most effective carbon sinks they are adding millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the process.The oceans are by far the biggest most effective carbon sinks and we’ve polluted and choked them with plastics, garbage and chemicals so much the ocean’s capacity to absorbed any more carbon is well short of the amounts we are continuing to pump out. As the carbon cycle continues the carbon being absorbed by the oceans is warmer due to greenhouse warming of the carbon in the atmosphere and so the oceans are heating up bigtime. That thermal load leads to thermal expansion and glacier melt which is sea level rise. Another 2 feet by the end of this century no matter what we do from now til then.And warmer oceans means bigger more powerful storms and altered rain and wind patterns. Some temperate zones become deserts and dust bowls while other areas have increasing heavy rains which means increasing floods in the continents. To an absolute value with absolute precision? No. The system is far too complex for the kind of spot-on to the 5th decimal point precision a lot of the deniers are demanding. But the overall picture is settled and only those with ulterior motives deny it.We’re fucked already and things after this century++ are going to get worse if we don’t stop today. This disaster is front-loaded for the next 100 years+ and will not be abated. After that depends on what we do now, today. I agree. Not going to happen. Are his disastrous policies responsible for a 5% increase or a 7.98427% increase in the damage the world will feel in 2150 and beyond? Can’t say. What we can say is that *ANY* increase in carbon emissions will raise temperatures and sea levels even more than the disastrous levels already front-loaded into the system and they will do so by a more disastrous degree in the future than what would have been had he done nothing at all.We all are continuing to add to the problem and Trump’s embrace of Big Carbon will make things even worse still. And for what? Political favor and money. Nice reasons to kill a species. What crap is this?We elect the people that decide what to do. And for the last 50+ years they have done nothing to help the issue because we didn’t want them to!.And right now, at least to some small degree, some are beginning to understand what the science has been saying these last 5 decades. We have already fucked the future of our species and are making things even worse every day.*We*, the public, will determine what legislation gets implemented. I fear Big Carbon and the mega rich will so influence the public that we will end up doing nothing again as usual. Burn the future of our children, the future of our species. We got ours and we don’t care!Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

One of the major problems with society, besides H. sapiens being generally stupid, is that societies are generally stupid. When a problem isn’t hitting us in the nose right now we don’t see it. We have a tendency to ignore not-so-pesky little problems because we have other things like football scores and dinner on our little minds. And the distractions put in front of us by the elite and special interests are effective at keeping us placated. As long as we perceive our immediate needs as being met and we have pleasant distractions to keep us occupied the problems of the future are well in the future which is not right now so, hey, there’s time to think about them later.In the case of climate change we are just now beginning to see the effects that have been building up over the last 100++ years but there are forces putting up white noise and hoping most of us won’t look too hard and remain distracted and placated a while longer so they can grow their bottom line bigger before anyone notices.But climate change is a front-loaded problem of 100++ years duration. Right now we are in for 100++ years of growing climate disasters that cannot be stopped no matter what we do. That means that in 100++ years when enough people become concerned about what’s hitting them in the nose right then there is yet another 100++ years of even bigger worser problems already in the pipeline coming their way that cannot be stopped.So, yeah, when things get so bad that populations are dying, societies are coming apart and society en mass, decides doing something drastic is really needed well they are in for yet another hundred++ years of ever growing disaster before whatever they decide to do begins to have any effect. And that effect will not stop or reverse the ever faster string of disasters plaguing the planet but may begin to slow it down. Maybe.There usually is a tipping point to these things past which you have lost no matter what you do. We don’t know where that point is, and probably will not know even when we’re well past it.So, now, today, right here in 2019, no matter what we decide to do or when we decide to do it the environment will have been tragically changed forever never to go back to the pleasant comfortable climate we humans evolved to fit within. And if we pass an unseen tipping point on our way through the present couple of centuries of coming climate disaster then premature extinction will be our legacy.Just in case anyone was wondering what all this impatience in climate change hub-bub was all about.

I don't appreciate the Alt-reich putting their politics above the survival of our species.

Oxygen is not the issue. The vast majority of our oxygen comes from the sea.The issue is the carbon capture. Younger plantings do not have the full mature ecosystem that does most of the capture. Planting 10 billion trees would help a bit but will take way too long to become the effective carbon sinks we need today. We need to stop making more carbon, today. Truth hurts. That's your political sensitivity. "We" refers to all the world.Biggest problems: metric tons CO2/year 2017 source

China	10,877.218
USofA	5,107.393
Europe	3,548.345
India	2,454.774
Russia	1,764.866
Japan	1,320.776
South Korea	673.324

We are *all* fucking up. Trump is just a symptom of the greater problem of us, we, all of us, not doing anything about it.The Trump situation is worse, however, in that, while the rest of the world (minus China) at least pay lip service to acknowledging there *is* a problem, Trump is so fucking stupid he thinks it's a hoax. He's a fool.China just doesn't care and is poisoning its own people along with the rest of us. When you come back think globally first. Then think USofA, then you. Keep your political BS out of it.This is no longer a political issue but is a survival issue being strangled by global and national politics.We are killing ourselves and we are too wrapped in the politics to do anything about it.That is the biggest challenge we need to get over before we can do anything to remediate our global survival problem.

Reality vs politics.Your side, and Trump, Big Carbon, Republicans specifically, apparently, do not care for the future generations or the future of the planet as evidenced by the reality of their actions.Instead of doing what we know must be done they are doing the exact opposite.Evil.

Their "concerns" about the science are based on their own selfishness, greed and power. Evil.The house is on fire and they question whether the flickering is actually flames or just swampgas reflecting moonlight off of Venus.Evil.

New study compares anthropomorphic warming to Chicxulub extinction event. LiveScience article

quote:

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The most vivid comparison the authors draw between our current climate crisis and the perturbations of the past involves Chicxulub the 6.2-mile-wide (10 kilometers) asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, leading to the extinction of 75% of life on Earth, including all the non-avian dinosaurs.

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As the asteroid plowed into Earth with billions of times the energy of an atomic bomb, shock waves from the blast triggered earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and wildfires, possibly ejecting as much as 1,400 gigatons (that's 1,400 billion tons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the researchers explained. The greenhouse effect that resulted from these sudden emissions, according to the researchers, may have warmed the planet and acidified the oceans for hundreds of years to come, contributing to the mass die-off of plants and animals known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.

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Still, even the highest estimated Chicxulub-related CO2 emissions are less than the cumulative, ongoing emissions associated with man-made climate change. Those emissions, the researchers wrote, amount to about 2,000 gigatons of CO2 pumped into the sky since the year 1750. It almost goes without saying at this point that, due to a failure to take meaningful global climate action, man-made emissions are still increasing every year.

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It's likely, the researchers wrote, that the results of this era of man-made meddling could look similar to the troubled centuries following Chicxulub and other ancient cataclysms. This era, the researchers concluded, "is likely to leave its legacy as a mass extinction from greenhouse-induced climate change on a biosphere already at a tipping point caused by habitat loss."

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The fall of the dinoserians gave rise to us mammals. Who will rise up after us? I would like to see the cephalopods take over. Maybe in 60+ million years there will be an octopus-descendant astronaut landing on the moon.

You know we can find all kinds of climate change deniers' videos on the internet.So what?This doesn't impact the discussion at all.

You know we can find all kinds of religious nutjobs' opinions on the internet.So what?This doesn't impact the discussion at all.

Reasonable points?What reasonable points?That solar gain enters walls, sidewalks and parking lots just as well as open fields, lakes and deserts? That this solar gain is reflected back into the atmosphere as infrared light (heat) to be retained or not depending upon the level of greenhouse gasses? That the problem of overpopulation and over building, paving over paradise to put up a parking lot is , somehow, *NOT* a part of our global warming problem?Just what "reasonable" points did this fool make?

And where does he think all that "urban" heat is going? What makes him think that urban heat is somehow temporary or local as opposed to existing on this planet? Where does he think all that "temporary" heat goes?This is exactly the kind of pseudo-science pap, smoke and mirrors and misdirection the denialists earn their living from selling books to weak-minded anti-science anti-human idiots.Don't be one of these, Faith.

I hope you don't think a few hundred thousand urban readings can outweigh the 10s of millions of global readings we take each year.I hope you don't think that 10s of thousands of scientists would miss something some self-aggrandizing climate charlatan says "may" be overlooked.I hope you realize that the $$ few million per year motive schools may have for climate science studies is far outweighed by Big Carbon's $$$ motive of $10 billion per day.Don't bother reading many of the climate charlatans. Other than the occasional jewish banking conspiracy or the "Jhina" hoax conspiracy or the Illuminati/Masons/Lizard People quest for world domination conspiracies, they all have the same false, misleading and mistaken arguments. At least the rest of the world gets together to discuss the issues. We can't be bothered to attend.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

There are many vastly more qualified to represent the USofA on the world stage than I.I am content with jawboning the heretics.

Not really. In my other haunts there are people equally as intractably stupid as here. It appears to be a human thing.And this is Trump territory. I'm surprised I haven't been shot in my favorite watering hole.But everybody there knows my name. When I walk in everyone shouts, "AZPaul!" They drop the 3 out of affection.

I thought I might have worded that wrong.I meant to reference my here at home liveware community not this most wonderful internet address virtual community.