[ad_1]
Thursday, a new study He came out warning that even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide, the world has reached the “point of no return” of climate change. The paper claims that’s because Arctic permafrost – permanently frozen, carbon-rich land made of rocks, water, and dead wildlife – is irreversibly melting and could continue to warm the planet for centuries by releasing carbon dioxide. Scary, right?
The only solution, the authors note, is to suck carbon out of the air with carbon capture, which is not yet proven to work at scale, or even employ more dangerous geoengineering technologies. The results and conclusions of the study have been widely covered Y a little out of breathBut here’s the thing: Analysis has some major problems.
“To be frank, the document sucks that shouldn’t have passed any competent peer review,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and energy systems analyst. “It’s an interesting thought experiment, but its results should be viewed with extreme skepticism until more complex models of the Earth system produce similar results.”
The study’s problems begin with its title, which refers to “permafrost melting.” That’s a red flag because, as Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist who heads the Arctic and Alpine Research Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder, pointed out, permafrost thaws rather than melts.
“Bags of ice stored here and there inside permafrost can melt,” he said. “But these are very different processes.” The distinction, she said, makes her think that researchers really don’t know what permafrost is.
G / O Media can get a commission
Even before entering the body of the study, the credited authors made me raise my eyebrows. They are not climate scientists, they are business school professors. And it shows in the report, because their model is simplistic. Climate researchers have spent decades building models that account for the complexities of climate. More complex models, for example, better illustrate ocean circulation patterns, which can have a large effect on long-term warming. They also show more accurately how much water vapor is in the atmosphere, which is a short-lived but common natural source of warming. The model in the new article overlooks much of this.
“It does not explicitly include things like the large-scale movement of air and water in the atmosphere and the ocean,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The new report also overestimates water vapor concentrations, making the model run unusually hot. However, another major flaw in the model also overestimates the warming potential of methane emissions. The authors state that methane will be the main driver of future temperature increases, but in doing so, they exaggerate the temperature increase that the methane concentrations in their model could produce.
More advanced models, Marvel said, are “more tied to reality” in their illustrations of water vapor concentrations and the timeline in which Arctic ice is melting and permafrost is melting. This allows them to provide a more accurate picture of how and when these changes could create feedback loops in which melting and thawing release more greenhouse gases, thereby warming the planet. Due to these inaccuracies, the simplified model distorts how much warming we would actually see if we cut our emissions immediately.
“Modern and complex models of the Earth system generally show compromised minimal warming in the future after zero emissions, even taking into account our best estimate of future permafrost melting,” Hausfather said.
Specifically, the new report stands in stark contrast to the United Nations ‘more recent findings.’ Intergovernmental Government Panel on Climate Change Y the European Geosciences Union.
“People lack that it is a simple model created by non-experts,” he said. “I am also concerned that there is a bias to cover him given his alleged dramatic findings.”
He noted that a 2019 meta-analysis of 18 Earth system models did, in fact, find that they immediately halt greenhouse gas emissions. would do drastically limit warming, but received much less coverage than the new role.
To be clear, no climate expert is arguing that warming feedback loops are not a concern or that melting permafrost releases methane. And it definitely does not mean that we should not act to reduce emissions quickly. But Marvel said that by focusing on greenhouse gases from the thawing of the Arctic soil, the authors’ suggestions for the future are wrong.
“I want to be clear: the thawing of the permafrost will likely result in a net increase in atmospheric methane concentrations. And methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. But methane concentrations are increasing considerably right now, and it is not due to permafrost, “he said. “It’s because of the oil and gas industry and large-scale agriculture.”
It may be predictable to say so, but it turns out that we need to cut our carbon emissions and phase out oil and gas immediately. The necessary changes will not be easy to carry out. As a groundbreaking 2018 IPCC report he said, they will require “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” But the alternative is far worse, even without the permafrost methane scare.
“If we can bring our emissions to zero completely, the drop in atmospheric CO2 concentrations will more than offset any additional future emissions from permafrost melt,” said Hausfather.
