The Great Siberian Thaw

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/the-great-siberian-thaw

by narpaldhillon • 5 years ago

185 101 5 years ago

newyorker.com

narpaldhillon2• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/RT1X3

nkurz• 5 years ago

https://outline.com/FyUGg8

narpaldhillon2• 5 years ago

I found this to be so fascinating, "At a certain point, nature takes over. Even the most forward-thinking legislature in the world can’t pass a law banning emissions from permafrost."

klipt• 5 years ago

Solar geoengineering could potentially stop further thawing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering

Retric• 5 years ago

That’s probably a significantly more difficult problem than stopping pollution as you actually need someone to pay for it directly. And of course we don’t know a good way to only try and cool the Arctic.

<Massive simplifications ahead> You can ballpark this yourself a 288 K black body in equilibrium is radiating as much energy as it receives, at T^4. To drop that by 1C to 287K means blocking 1- ( 287^4 /288^4) or roughly 1.4% of all sunlight. As the earth’s radius 6,371 km ignoring the atmosphere, the classic sunshade at L1 idea needs a surface area of something like 1.7 million km^2. And that’s assuming we didn’t keep dumping any CO2 into the air and ignore the fact the earth isn’t in equilibrium it’s warming etc etc.

A few ideas for getting various things into the upper atmosphere have been considered but reflecting an extra 1.4% or more sunlight would be a true ly Herculean task with any of those ideas and you couldn’t stop as they all decay over time.

snitch182• 5 years ago

and once we did it we would encounter the gargantuan sideeffects of that ...

pezzana• 5 years ago

In 1998, Zimov brought the first horses to what he called Pleistocene Park, a fenced tract of land an hour’s boat ride from the research station. Since then, the park has grown to eight square miles, and it is now home to a hundred and fifty animals, not just horses but bison, sheep, yaks, and camels. To give them a head start, Nikita sped about the territory in the family’s “tank”—a hefty, all-terrain transport vehicle on treads—knocking down trees and undergrowth.

For more on the human angle, see this piece, which includes a fascinating video:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleisto...

kreelman• 5 years ago

I'm kind of surprised there isn't more interest in this article.

Any big change like this would seem to me to hint at some large effects later on. In Russia alone, the changes have the potential to be huge.

I guess it is still kind of "New Year" and people are hunkered down with COVID all over the world.

chiefalchemist• 5 years ago

It's not new news. This idea (i.e., permafrost thaw) has been circulating for quite some time. I'm sure I've read similar at least three times previously, probably more.

missedthecue• 5 years ago

I wonder how much of the land is going to become farmable now

lkxijlewlf• 5 years ago

Too much?

masklinn2• 5 years ago

More like not much: the soil is non-existent, and because the latitude and weather remains dreadful the growing seasons are short.

Furthermore Siberia will not be exempt from climactic instability, meaning unpredictable weather events (limited seasonal regularity) making YoY farming planning extremely difficult.

Not only that, but the thawing creates extremely unstable ground, leading to very irregular subsidence.

lovecg• 5 years ago

I read somewhere that the soil is the problem, not just the local climate. And soil takes a long time to accumulate the good stuff. So in short, places with good soil will become less farmable and places with now better climate won’t have good soil. We’re all kinda screwed then.

bpodgursky2• 5 years ago

Mmm. Modern fertilizer has done a lot to neutralize the importance of good soil. You can't farm rocks, but the US west has done a lot with sand + fertilizer.

As long as you have money, water, sun, heat, and something better than bedrock, I wouldn't call it unrealistic.

mym19902• 5 years ago

Soil is not an essential piece to growing crops. Even now hydroponics is taking off in many places.

trhway• 5 years ago

Not just farmable. Much better farmable like these days in my old town back in Russia. Though in exchange children have seen practically no snow there in the last 20 years.

marcus_holmes2• 5 years ago

I wonder how many more trees are going to grow on the defrosted land. Siberia is basically one enormous birch forest already [0]. I assume that as the land warms that treeline is going to advance north.

[0] I rode the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Ulan Bator, and it was days of the exact same scenery: birch trees lining the railway, with the occasional breathtaking scene that was just often enough to keep me staring at trees most of the trip.

burntoutfire• 5 years ago

Further north, it's mostly spruce.

EGreg• 5 years ago

"and twice as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere. "

"As levels of carbon dioxide rose from 550ppm to 945ppm to 1400ppm, subjects’ scores under most headings declined substantially. (Problem-solving ability also seemed to suffer as levels of volatile organic compounds rose.)"

"2,000-5,000 ppm: level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air; poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present. > 5,000 ppm: This indicates unusual air conditions where high levels of other gases also could be present."

"Based on preliminary analysis, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2020 was 412.5 parts per million (ppm for short), setting a new record high amount despite the economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic."

hmm

sometimeshuman• 5 years ago

Many stressors have an adaptation phase. It is plausible those effects get reduced with prolonged exposure in humans although that wasn't necessarily the case in mice: "Long-term exposure of mice to 890 ppm atmospheric CO 2 alters growth trajectories and elicits hyperactive behaviours in young adulthood"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34731494/

lmilcin6• 5 years ago

I think I red a study, many years ago, about lowered performance in Mexico City due to their local higher CO2 concentration.

sega_sai• 5 years ago

I've found the article so well written. It was a joy to read, notwithstanding the grim topic.

hh3k02• 5 years ago

I agree, it made me hope there'd be a way to pay for this particular article when I reach its end.

selectodude• 5 years ago

There is - get yourself a subscription to The New Yorker. This piece of long-form is not unusual for them.

fowkswe• 5 years ago

The New Yorker's climate coverage is fantastic and terrifying. Look for articles by Elizabeth Kolbert, particularly the one's she did back in '05 - The Climate of Man I, II and III

akeck• 5 years ago

It's the land version of the Clathrate Gun.

vermilingua• 5 years ago

The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1]

I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated and pushed back every five years, and nobody seems to be held accountable for it.

Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

nelox• 5 years ago

What makes you think we deserve to survive?

chillwaves• 5 years ago

After the coming resource\migration wars, some of this will sort itself out. Don't worry.

jay_kyburz4• 5 years ago

I just realized that perhaps the problem is not global warming. Perhaps the problem is that we are having children. If we all just decided to stop having kids, nobody would care what the weather was like at the end of the century.

kragen10• 5 years ago

The article says of Ted Schuur, "He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment." So I guess we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 5–15% below where we would have otherwise needed to.

We did need a moonshot tech breakthrough, namely scalable affordable renewable energy. But that breakthrough has already happened: both PV and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels now in much of the world, and PV definitely can scale up to replace fossil fuels, and wind probably can too. So in 8–16 years we enter an era of unprecedented energy abundance, similar to the First Industrial Revolution. There are relatively straightforward ways to use this abundant energy to capture atmospheric CO₂. I outlined one in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736.

abathur3• 5 years ago

The problem, as I try to breadcrumb when I find these (most-recently in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218174) isn't necessarily the technology--it's the people.

It's a complex adaptive system where different regions/countries have already drawn their own geologic, solar, and atmospheric straws. Just because PV and wind are pushing back fossil fuels at market rates now doesn't mean entrenched fossil-fuel-deposit-rich nations will throw up their hands, turn off the pumps/mines, and go all-renewable. If wholesale fossil remains unit-profitable to extract and burn for some purpose (say, converting into crypto--or just because 40% of the value of your oil reserves minus cost is still greater than what you have in the bank), there will be a reason to burn it.

On the other side, too, there will be people whose livelihoods come to depend on a different kind of extraction.

screenbreakout6• 5 years ago

Wouldn't just a change in the way we view our economy work? If a lot of the emissions come from creating GDP, why not take a break, live off our assets,like when Covid initially happened... i'd continue but would probably get buried as a utopian (tbh it seems like businesses a machines getting people create more machines while getting very little actual return...)

deanCommie2• 5 years ago

Except the situation isn't over when your house has burned to the ground.

Taking the metaphor literally...

You have a family and you need shelter. You need to figure out how to survive without shelter. You need to see what you can salvage. Which means still trying to put the fire out so that some of your things or some of the materials can be salvaged so you can consider rebuilding. You need to start clearing out the rubble so that you can think about eventually rebuilding your house on that land.

Yes, it's discouraging, yes it's demoralizing. But humanity (and individual humans) has faced all sorts of extreme adversity over our history. As living creatures we have a survival instinct that requires us to continue fighting. Yes, this particular crisis is our own creation. Yes, it will damage the Earth and our specific ecosystem more than any other action we've ever done in our short time here. Yes, we might have a generation or several generations globally who will have a worse quality of life than the previous one for the first time in several hundreds of years. Yes, it's frustrating that this was caused by selfish greedy humans who will never be held accountable for it, and who will most likely have to coexist with, and collaborate on solutions when they finally decide when it's too late.

Nevertheless, we persevere, and we each do what we can to minimize the damage, to innovate solutions that may protect that what remains, and we think long-long-term.

Our ancestors frequently knew that they were a part of something much bigger and that the impact they could have had on the world or improving the lives of their children were miniscule. Yet they did so anyway. We have been brought up in a generation of boundless optimism thinking that we would all change the world for the better, while living in continuously growing prosperity. Not all of that turned out to be true. That's okay. We still keep going.

Understand, I did not start out with this point of view. I'm not an optimist by nature. I spent years being depressed and fatalist as you might be. I chose this mindset as a survival tactic. But I do believe everything I wrote.

jay_kyburz4• 5 years ago

I think its both valuable and important to recognize that the climate change is inevitable so that we can stop talking about how we might prevent it, and start talking about how we can sustain our civilization regardless of the weather. (How would we sustain ourselves if we lived in a satellite orbiting the sun?)

I also think neither democracy or capitalism is well equipped to ask people to make large sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. I think we should stop talking about people making sacrifices, and put effort into engineering our way out of this problem.

baybal22• 5 years ago

Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive?

Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia.

1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India.

Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them.

Kilometers long storm surges, and multi-decade coastal errosion are also something people learned to live with.

FreeFull• 5 years ago

What about temperatures up to 49 degrees Celsius, like the heatwave in India back in 2019? If the air is moist, it can become literally impossible for even healthy humans to survive without some external way of cooling off.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Once the permafrost starts melting off, there isn’t much time left for us. Hold your children tight, and comfort them for the rest of their short lives.

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

Don't worry you'll be okay. Every culture had an end times prophecy.

gremlinsinc• 5 years ago

there's a difference between an end times prophecy and a confirmation that a planet killing asteroid will hit the earth in x months/years...

there's ambiguity on how long we have left.. but we're headed towards extinction or nearly... maybe a few million survive to rebuild..

but life as we live today is completely unsustainable...

xrd• 5 years ago

Is it possible to live in isolated sealed compounds that protect us from all that carbon? Can we build filtration systems?

kragen10• 5 years ago

The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. Filtering out methane and CO₂ is routine for life-support systems in submarines, spacecraft, and, yes, bunkers, so it's not infeasible. The problem is that they cause global warming, not toxicity, and we can't build an isolated sealed compound to protect the planet from them.

lmilcin6• 5 years ago

The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels.

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

Current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm which already has a measurable impact on performance on tasks (compared to 250ppm couple decades ago).

Increasing it to just 1000ppm further degrades performance. And 2500ppm makes it difficult to concentrate on anything complex.

Even slight increase in concentration could lead to drastic changes over time when you consider everybody gets a little dumber.

https://skepticalscience.com/how-sapiens-in-the-world-of-hig...

EDIT: kragen, I am being throttled so here is my response to your below comment:

When there is plenty arguments and scientific consensus to the contrary, and the person presents numbers obviously derived from thin air, I think it is fair to state the person does not know what they are talking about.

Toxicology is a complex topic. But it is safe to say CO2 becomes toxic way before it becomes lethal. Which is to say you see adverse effects even before the concentration reaches lethal level. It may maybe take hundreds of times before it becomes immediately lethal but it is already toxic at about current concentration or 2-5 times current concentration, depending on who you ask, and not "hundreds of times" higher.

ed25519FUUU• 5 years ago

If only we could invent some kind of living organisms which consume CO2 and emit oxygen! (Sorry, it’s a little snarky!)

I’m all seriousness, earth seems to find a balance when it goes through these types of events. Whether we’ll make it through the ride is to be seen.

sci_prog• 5 years ago

You are right, Earth does have mechanisms through which it regulates the CO2 and tries to bring it back to "balance". But it is important to note that these mechanics (e.g. increased in weathering) take 10s-100s of thousands of years to take effect.

yakshaving_jgt4• 5 years ago

The sarcasm is fine, but I have no sense of whether or not the point is even valid. Do you have any back of the napkin maths to illustrate how effective covering the Earth’s land masses in trees would be, even if we could terraform all the big deserts? Planting a load of trees is at least actionable, but I wonder if it’s also futile.

lmilcin6• 5 years ago

Filtering carbon dioxide to have breathing air at home isn't difficult. But housing 8 billion people in sealed environment is.

The trouble with CO2 is that already the amount of it in atmosphere starts making us measurably dumber and it is only going to get worse.

1000ppm is a badly ventilated room that causes headache and poor performance on tasks. Imagine experiencing this for your entire life. Imagine ALL kids having trouble with concentration, entire Earth's population getting dumber. As if we did not have problems already...

mellavora• 5 years ago

What if we consider the sealed environment "the earth"?

kleton• 5 years ago

Nominative determinism that might have been missed by non-Slavophones: Zimov would translate to (belonging to winter), like the English surname, Winters.

tyronehed• 5 years ago

This permafrost melt is what will finally kill us off.

The Great Siberian Thaw

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