Paradise Lost - Irony In Climate Change.

[putnam6]

This was a comment at ATS, and a previous thread, but I feel it should be done again in a non redundant setting.

A topical story, with my take on climate change. That kind of says "everyone is right and everyone is wrong" simultaneously.

Thread begin:

Climate change is coming, and your small island is sinking.

[Video: https://youtu.be/JelRwUpdABE?si=ZCVrv99LOwpNOr40]

They can't keep the water back anymore, and this is the first of MANY Panamanian islands that are to be voluntarily evacuated.

The sea level rise is hard to dispute.

My dispute is the anthropogenic way we caused it to happen. We caused the melt off more recently.

I think, in a twisted Irony, our recognition of our hands in climate change brought on the actions which actually accelerated it.

I know the sulfur from coal and vehicle smog killed trees, but had they not selectively filtered the emissions they might not have thrown wacky concentrations of greenhouse vs. aerosols into the atmosphere for over 50 years running now.

So basically to save trees and people's lungs from adjacent burning coal, they attacked almost ALL aerosols, and a large portion of greenhouse gasses.

Then, you can line up a seemingly exponential acceleration starting pricely with the imposition of EPA exhaust regulations. The aggressive reduction in aerosols is coorlative to the rise in temperature. It lines up so well you can single out the mandating of CATALYTIC CONVERTORS as the most likely 'accelerant." In recent times that's become more pronounced. Almost ZERO aerosols are now released, meaning no matter how little greenhouse emissions they reduce it to, they are still adding to the already askew atmospheric concentrations. No matter how you attack it through regulation you just add to the problem that exists until you address the other loss of albedo.

It's getting to the point where purposely releasing aerosols in the upper atmosphere will be the ONLY way to stop this greenhouse imbalance. If it's about albedo, there's easier ways to do that. Like a single Mt. Tambora. Perhaps engineered volcanic cooling is an answer to climate change. Because all our effort combined amount to an engineered greenhouse effect as things stand now.

No one likes this explanation though, pro and con alike.

What are your opinions on the cause of anthropogenic Climate change? Does anthropogenic climate change exist? Could my insane idea to "play Mt. Tambora" cause a more devastating cold snap? Is it releasing tigers to get rid of rodents?

 I grew up with the fear that the ozone hole over Antarctica would continue to grow and eventually, we would all die from skin cancer or we would have to live underground.

With it being hyped so much along with conventional academic wisdom it would never recover, we just assumed by now we all would be lathered up in maximum sunblock, outdoor activities would be curtailed, and perhaps we would become creatures of the night.

We worried and learned about a lot of stuff in the 80s like AIDS, Nuclear War, Crime, Poverty, and Pollution. Climatology is an inexact science, add in the 80s contemporaneous hyperbolic dystopian descriptions of the future of humanity. No wonder my generation decided to drink, smoke, snort, ingest any substance, numb our brains, and party like it's 1999 to prepare for our inevitable fast-approaching doom. 

Except
The experts were off a bit

 

• In the 1980s, the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was dramatic, with about 60% of the ozone depleted at its peak in September-October each year compared to pre-1980 levels.
  
• The Montreal Protocol, an international agreement signed in 1987, regulated the phase-out of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances globally.
  
• With the decline of CFCs in the atmosphere due to the Montreal Protocol, the ozone hole has slowly been recovering over the past few decades, though at a slower rate than scientists initially predicted.
  
• As of the early 2020s, the ozone hole over Antarctica is still occurring annually but is smaller and projected to continue recovering over the next few decades if emissions of ozone-depleting substances are eliminated completely.
  
• Full recovery of the ozone layer over the Antarctic is expected between 2060-2080 based on current projections, restoring protective UV radiation shielding above pre-1980 levels.
  

Furthermore, COVID lockdowns highlighted that our ecosystem might have serious regenerative capabilities, even dirty filthy Wuhan China did not see immediate returns.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilit...-the-norm/

The difference between the model simulated values and the measured ground observations represents the change in emissions due to the pandemic response. The researchers received data from 46 countries—a total of 5,756 observation sites on the ground—relaying hourly atmospheric composition measurements in near-real time. On a city-level, 50 of the 61 analyzed cities show nitrogen dioxide reductions between 20-50%.
“In some ways I was surprised by how much it dropped,” said Keller. “Many countries have already done a very good job in lowering their nitrogen dioxide concentrations over the last decades due to clean air regulations, but what our results clearly show is that there is still asignificant human behavior-driven contribution.”

 
Wuhan, China was the first municipality reporting an outbreak of COVID-19. It was also the first to show reduced nitrogen dioxide emissions—60% lower than simulated values expected. A 60% decrease in Milan and a 45% decrease in New York followed shortly, as their local restrictions went into effect.
“You could, at times, even see the decrease in nitrogen dioxide before the official policies went into place,” said co-author Emma Knowland with USRA at Goddard’s GMAO. “People were probably reducing their transit because the talk of the COVID-19 threat was already happening before we were actually told to shut down.” Once restrictions were eased, the decreases in nitrogen dioxide lessened, but remained below expected “business as usual” values.

Nitrogen dioxide levels often dip during Lunar New Year celebrations in China and much of Asia, and then rebound. But no rebound was evident this year over Wuhan, China where the virus was first reported, and nitrogen dioxide levels remained much lower than in 2019.
Credits: NASA’s Earth Observatory

This is not to say climate change is not a serious problem, it certainly is but this highlights our current understanding and the ratios involved might be lower than when we first extrapolated the data. I recall the People's Almanac of Predictions published in 1980. I read this book voraciously as a 15-year-old sci-fi aficionado. Predictions from experts on all topics including global warming and climate change IIRC were mostly way off base. We have to realize it may be beyond our current understanding, much like we didn't know the microscopic nature of germs till post 1860s and thought medical science knew all that was to know by the time the Spanish Flu hit. We did not and it was not even close. It all might be beyond our comprehension and model-making, add in the money-making aspect and the political angle makes me somewhat skeptical AF.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/06/the-book-of-pre

  https://archive.org/details/peoplesalman...8/mode/2up

 The book is on Archive.org and is still an interesting read today...