American Wildfires

UncleJesse said:

I think tons of Republicans believe in climate change. I do. Is it human caused..probably to some extent. Humans are the problem with the world. All humans. They are hypocritical and in the end only care about themselves when it comes down to it. When the current humans destroy the world the earth will just consume it all and nature will continue on, just as it has for years and years. Human existence here is a blip, a snapshot, a nothing. Every person will die, be gone, you will be forgotten in 200 years or sooner, but the earth will go on.

Click to expand...

The planet burns well over 100 million barrels of oil A DAY. That's roughly 40 BILLION barrels annually. No one could rationally explain how that amount of carbon dioxide production would not have a deep and lasting impact on the Earth's climate.

"Some extent" doesn't begin to cover it.

And that's not all; now that temperatures in and near the Arctic have risen by multiples of the 1.5C (2.7F) of the Paris Climate Accord, the permafrost is melting and all of that biological material that's been locked away for so many millennia is now decomposing and releasing vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

But wait- there's more! Warming ocean water temperatures in the Arctic are directly threatening to unleash vast reserves of methane hydrate, which will both acidify the oceans and destroy the ecosystem and bubble up and add yet more methane to the atmosphere.

Methane is 80 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but fortunately it does not last nearly as long... but it breaks down into carbon dioxide, which does last for millennia in the atmosphere.

This is the dreaded "clathrate bomb" that once triggered cannot be undone; it will create plenty of global warming on its own to sustain the cascade of ocean warming and clathrate melting no matter what humans do.

I'm beginning to think that the only thing that has any chance of stopping this climate runaway is a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which haven't been seen since the Mount Tambora explosion of 1815. That caused "the year without a summer" in 1816 and in fact caused several years of significantly cooler global climate.

Even that wouldn't magically make the world's excess CO2 go away, so humanity might well only get a few years' respite.

What takes CO2 out of the atmosphere? Us growers know! PLANTS! Reforestation, rewilding, undoing hundreds of thousands of square miles of asphalt and cement pavement in favor of plants and then burying the carbon they sequester is by far the best hope of reversing the trend of increasing atmospheric CO2.

Doesn't seem likely, so I think we're in for a very bumpy ride.