Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops - Part 5: Albedo
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ต.ค. 2020
- Subtitled in 23 languages.
The reflectivity of snow and ice at the poles, known as the albedo effect, is one of Earth’s most important cooling mechanisms. But today, this reflectivity is being threatened by global warming, as the polar snow and ice melt, reducing the planet’s ability to reflect sunlight and setting off a dangerous warming loop: as more ice melts, the reflectivity decreases, the Arctic warms, and more ice melts. The volume of ice in the Arctic has shrunk 75% in the past 40 years, and scientists predict that summer ice there will disappear completely by the end of the century.
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I have a serious problem with part 5 of these videos when Richard Gere says "if sea levels rise by 100 ft, millions of people will be displaced". ( I have a phd in feedback cycles (ie control theory), statistical inference and estimation theory. I was also offered a job as a CTO of a climate risk assessment startup). So look folks, 50% of the world's largest cities are at sea level. 500 million Chinese live at sea level. All of the Pacific Islanders live at sea level. Bangladesh is almost under water right now. Then there are issues with king tides and storm surge and hurricanes as they couple with sea level rise. So forget about 100 ft of sea level rise and what that would do to the amount of farmland in the world (let alone rice patties). 1-2 feet of sea level rise coupled with storms is sufficient to displace *billions* of people, causing mass refugee movements, starvation, disease, human exploitation, massive fascist/ xenophobic responses, political instability religious extremism and ultimately world war. And all this would be happening while taking all rice out of production and other crops besides. An error in order of magnitude is an error in kind!
Never once does it state "agriculture is the Achilles Heel of humanity", which is the number 1 most important message to convey... nor attempt to explain why.
And also, there's no discussion whatsoever of the #1 most important positive feedback cycle (aka vicious circle or feedback loop) of all: human population growth. We have resources on the planet for 680 million people to live an American lifestyle according to Bill McKibben, a world renowned climatologist. Currently there are 330 million Americans and 8 billion - 330 million other people all aiming to live and eat like Americans do. Americans ate 4.7% of the world's population using 20% of its resources. We're over leveraging the planet's renewable resources by 12x or so.
And furthermore there's absolutely no discussion of how we go about persuading millions of ignorant, selfish, apathetic people that they must e.g. stop eating beef.
There's no discussion of human sources of methane production from landfills or from agriculture at all in fact.
There's a collective action problem here. A Tragedy of the Commons problem here. It's true there's a brief discussion of economic externalities and the game of hot potato we play. But these videos completely abdicate their responsibility to point out how corporations are setting public policy and doing so in a way that is maximally destructive to humanity.
And these videos fundamentally fail to show the main problem here... to recognize the major tension in our society right now between having the cake and being able to eat it too. For instance fossil fuels are used to make fertilizer, to make pesticides, to move farm equipment, to pump water (extremely energy intensive), to till and sow and reap a harvest, to mill the crop, to run grain elevators, to run refrigerators, to move crops to trucks, to make plastic wrapping and containers, to keep freezers cold in stores, for gas to go buy groceries, to cook a meal, to clean the dishes to make the containers the dish soap is stored in, to haul the refuse away afterwards, to run the equipment that cleans the sewer water e.t.c. We currently have a society where 1 farmer can feed 10 million people. Fossil fuels are making that possible. If we quit using them cold turkey, 99% of humanity would starve...
Politicians are corrupt, self-interested, blind, science ignorant and lacking in moral fiber/ mass, how are we going to address that problem again?
How are we going to persuade 330 million Americans they need to reduce not just their emissions by 5x, but also use 5x less copper, zinc, iron, lithium, manganese, nickel, gallium, selenium, palladium, silver, cobalt, boron, gold, lead, silicon, e.t.c?
Also, these videos are not providing any sensitivity analysis, for the most part, except for a few statements quickly said in passing. It's like they're hitting the nail, yes, but only with a glancing blow at times. What's our instantaneous rate of forest loss in California, Ontario, Spain, Italy, Greece, Siberia and the Amazon? What is the half life of all forests in the northern hemisphere likely to be if California loses 4% of its forests in a year? This is a related rates problem. If differential equations is too overwhelming for this audience, then what does basic common sense say? What's our estimated impact analysis for the fact that Ontario has > 22 million less forested acres this year than it did last year?
What about there rate of rice patty loss from salt water intrusion? What's the coupling between eating rice and eating wheat or corn or other grains? 40% of Asia used to feed itself off of the ocean. What is that number now?
So yeah, in the one hand the videos are very good. Even excellent. On the other hand I'm quite frustrated with the allocation of time and the fact some of the most important topics of all were summarily ignored.
Scarcity breeds aggression. Insects and climate change are meanwhile caught up in positive feedback cycles that ate destroying crops. There was no mention of the fact that heat waves are 4x as likely at 1.5 deg C and 13.8x as likely at 2 deg C of warming. There's no mention of how heat waves and lack of water affect agriculture either directly or indirectly (via snap freezes, hurricanes, hail, e.t.c). Bill McKibben says pine trees must move north by 1 km/year to maintain thermal equilibrium. Anyone know of any trees that can walk (outside of the movies)? What are the implications? Most of the world's major rivers ate running at all time lows right now. What ate the implications? 1.2 billion Asians depend on Himalayan snow melt for agriculture which is failing right now. What are the implications? What happens to our supply lines if the Panama canal stops functioning due to drought? What happens to geopolitical stability if other countries besides India stop exporting their food? We're looking at a 30% decrease in agricultural yield in North America in 2030 versus 2020 for every crop except dryland wheat. Crop failures are 4x as likely at 1.5 deg C and 20x as likely at 2 deg C of warming. The effects are very nonlinear.
Unfortunately this video didn't broach the topic of a linear/proportionate response versus a nonlinear/disproportionate one. And these estimates on agricultural impact were just looking at heat stress and drought concerns, not on Japanese beetles, Asian moths, other invasive pests, hail damage, snap freezes, floods, muddy fields that can't be ploughed, the lack of pollinators (because invasive hornets are killing all the bees entre outre).
There's also no discussion of what CO2 adsorption is doing to the pH of ocean. We're on track to have all corral life (aka fish nurseries) and all shellfish life become impossible by 2040 as the ocean pH drops below 7.95. I guess 40% of Asua is about to start eating a lot more terrestrial protein (which is maximally emissions intensive). This is of course its own positive feedback cycle. Cows emit 6L/day of methane which means eating beef is 80x as emissions intensive as eating most veggies. Furthermore the human body only digests animal protein 25% as well as it does vegetable protein, we're not optimized for it. (My uncle did a PhD on this very topic at Stanford finished magnum sum laude, not cum laude... and then spent 15 years doing food planning work for Asian countries as a principle economist at the World Bank. You would be well advised to trust him on this one...).
So in summary. We're still looking at the world through a straw here. We're definitely seeing some dots now. But we haven't really succeeded in connecting many of them yet.
If humanity doesn't change its value systems *over night* in a dramatically and remarkably dramatic fashion, then humanity is done. If food prices double when much of the world is already spending 50% of its income on food... well that's all of the prerequisite conditions for a french revolution right there... in every country on Earth.
It's time we do some Big O analysis (scaling considerations) here and some sensitivity analysis. This may not be an opportune juncture to add another 1-2 billion hungry mouths to the human population.
There's also no mention of the fact that ecological diversity is collapsing. The biomass of wildlife on the planet is down 2/3 in the last 30 years. We have 1.2 billion cattle and 15k lions, giraffes, gorillas, whales, cheetahs, rhinos, polar bears, grizzlies, etc. I hope you appreciate that in nature ecological diversity means robustness. Lack of robustness means mad cow, sars, covid etc. It means disease of one kind or another. Bees are doing $36 trillion a year of free labor for us and yet we're wiping them out. How smart is that? I think we're about to go hungry. And seeing as we'll hit 2 deg C of warming between 2035-2040, I think that's when our civilization goes pear shaped. We can not contend with a planet where our agricultural exploits fail 20x as often, not when all the pollinators are disappearing, all the rice patties are being poisoned by salt water, when we're losing farm land to the ocean and when population is growing exponentially all the while. I haven't even mentioned what happens if the ogallala aquifer fails or the Colorado river fails or all the wells in the California central valley run dry. Presently 1200 of them are at risk of doing so.
Anyone remember what happened to the Mayans? I prefer to learn my history lessons vicariously, what about you?
Fantastic content. I will be sharing. Its been hard to find concrete analysis of the feedback loops associated with climate change, so this is truly a gift
We are delighted to hear that this has been useful! Thank you for the support.
thank you from Brasil!
Very impressing. Please translate and bring it on german TV. There are many people who don't know this. Even if we have year 2021.
Thank you for watching! Subtitles in German are available. Simply click the 'Settings' icon on the bottom right corner of the video and click 'Subtitles/CC.'
These series of videos are great; concise but full of information. Narration is excellent, experts in the video are on point. Thanks!
I do, however, wonder why you leave a statement in their that said we will lose summer ice by end of the century when it really is more like end of this decade according to current trends? Probably lose winter ice by end of century, summer will be long gone. That really changes the game. I think these distinctions are important, end of the century is past most of our life times so we can dismiss it more easily ....
Good movies!
Thanks for watching!