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But this planet will survive at least as long as the sun keeps shining on it.
The Earth is more resilient than the ungrateful and parasitical human squatters that make insignificant attempts to destroy it.
Self-hating human! People criticize me when I posit that envirofascists are motivated by hatred of man. But the hatred and contempt dripping from this post is wonderfully honest and illustrative.
Methane may react more easily with other chemicals to form non-methane compounds. According to two of the sources, it reacts with oxygen and chlorine. It can react in the air with OH (hydroxide?) in the atmosphere ( source 3, pg 15).
It seems like carbon does not like to play well with others, and that is why it may be more of an issue. One of the sources also states that Methane breaks down sometimes into CO2, but I can't remember where I read that. Methane can also be used as a fuel, so getting $$ from governments to recapture it may be easier than for CO2:
On the other hand CO2 can't be used for fuel, so it may be hard to get money to capture it. It does a great job of acidifying ground water and ocean water, though Ha ha ha. That IMO would be bad for humans. What CO2 IS good for is growing plants, but getting people to grow plants and stop killing them, is very hard.
Source 4 seems to suggest that CO2 does not easily react with other readily available chemicals. For instance, you need to provide a low PH to get it to react with certain substances. (source 4, pg 45). It may also need extra energy to react such as heat or pressure. If you have time, please take a look at the references and let me know what you think.
That's interesting about methane, but I haven't heard that it's "not as much of an issue as CO2". I've heard the opposite, in fact. And methane has been releasing into the atmosphere from the arctic for years now, and there are no plans in place to capture it. And it wasn't discussed in the Paris talks at all. Nations would have to start capturing it now if mankind wants to avert a disaster, but it's not on anyone's agenda, except a few scientists' in nations with land in the arctic.
You are not over-reacting.
I getting older and I see the changes everywhere around me. However, I don't believe the really drmatic or unpleasant stuff will begin happening until sometime after I'm in the grave. The youngest folks reading this are going to have many things happen over the course of their lifetimes. I can only wish you well,
Sorry I cut out some of your post, but I wanted to make my point with yours. Yes. I think along the same lines. this is going to become a bumpy ride. And I do think humans are powerful enough at this point to affect the climate. We have become a virus of sorts.
And methane isn't hard to catch and take out of the atmosphere?
Actually, the greater threat now is unbridled methane release from the arctic permafrost, and from the underwater continental shelf in the arctic. Methane is around 100 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. Now that CO2 levels have reached a point that arctic methane release is underway, even if CO2 levels remained stable or even decreased in a few years, the heat the planet is experiencing would take decades to reverse, so methane release will continue. The risk is that the heating of the atmosphere has reached an unstoppable point due to the methane problem, and could at some point possibly sooner rather than later, trigger a massive methane "burp" all over the planet, where all methane sources will release at once. When that happens (if not before), we'll be cooked.
Doomed? It looks that way. The only hope is that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet will stop the Gulf Stream, and cause a new Ice Age, halting the warming process. Difficult to say if that would overpower the methane effect or not. There's not much to be done but wait and see.
The only fly in your ointment is that the ice caps melt fully every 5,000 years or so. And then they refreeze. So I might conclude the earth has some sort of safety valve to handle the issue.
Self-hating human! People criticize me when I posit that envirofascists are motivated by hatred of man. But the hatred and contempt dripping from this post is wonderfully honest and illustrative.
But it's the truth. People/Governments always talk about "saving the Earth" blah blah.
The Earth will adapt and be fine no matter what-it is US, humans that need saving from a future uninhabitable planet, but we are too arrogant to address it.
Earth is doomed once the sun turns into a Red giant and scorches the planet anyway. But by then mankind will have either destroyed itself already or moved on to other planets.
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I think the earth is doomed long before the sun burns out. Right now I give us another couple hundred years at most unless something serious is done. And probably a lot less. You have about three countries in the world trying to limit pollution and the rest spewing greenhouse gasses at increasing levels.
I've got maybe 10 or 15 years left. I have already seen massive changes. I pity the younger folk.
When I was a kid surfing off SoCal the water was crystal clear. Now it's opaque. There were massive beds of kelp, they are gone. Living in AZ as a kid the air was crystal clear, the mountains were tack sharp. Now general atmospheric haze obscures everything, all the time. Yet we still spew coal dust into our air.
There are few old growth forests left. There are few unpolluted rivers - heck the Colorado is a sewage pond. Las Vegas pumps a billion gallons of treated sewage into Lake Mead every year - and then the fools in Los Angeles DRINK it. LOL
And now it's full of heavy metals courtesy of EPA incompetence.
Yes, we are killing the planet and I see no way to get people to stop doing it.
I think the earth is doomed long before the sun burns out. Right now I give us another couple hundred years at most unless something serious is done. And probably a lot less. You have about three countries in the world trying to limit pollution and the rest spewing greenhouse gasses at increasing levels.
I've got maybe 10 or 15 years left. I have already seen massive changes. I pity the younger folk.
When I was a kid surfing off SoCal the water was crystal clear. Now it's opaque. There were massive beds of kelp, they are gone. Living in AZ as a kid the air was crystal clear, the mountains were tack sharp. Now general atmospheric haze obscures everything, all the time. Yet we still spew coal dust into our air.
There are few old growth forests left. There are few unpolluted rivers - heck the Colorado is a sewage pond. Las Vegas pumps a billion gallons of treated sewage into Lake Mead every year - and then the fools in Los Angeles DRINK it. LOL
And now it's full of heavy metals courtesy of EPA incompetence.
Yes, we are killing the planet and I see no way to get people to stop doing it.
This is envirofascist nonsense. That the Earth is doomed and we are all going to die. Armageddonism is a key part of the playbook. Of course, it's nonsense. No one is going to die and everything is going to be just fine. Oil and coal will run out naturally in 200 years or so and then we will organically switch to nuclear, solar, wind, etc. The Earth changes every minute of the day all by its lonesome. That you no longer see kelp somewhere or that an area of water is opaque means precisely nothing at all.
The best way to accelerate the change from fossil fuels to solar and nuclear is simple: DO NOTHING. Use up fossil fuels in the course of the business of life and it will run out on its own. Meanwhile, vigorously drill and frack and any other extraction methods we can come up with. The planet belongs to Man and we are perfectly correct to use the natural resources for our benefit. And when they run out, we will have so much accrued knowledge on alternatives that we can switch to them over time without a care in the world.
While we don't want to over-pollute, make no mistake. Certain levels of pollution and dumping are acceptable and desirable. They are the cost of living well and we should be willing to pay it. Of course, we should develop technology to minimize the impact, but POLLUTION IN MODERATION is OK.
Now let's stop the Green nonsense. Life on the planet is changing, but not ending. Where we live on the planet will change, but not end. Climate on the planet will change, and that's perfectly OK. We can figure out the correct adaptation, and we will. However it must all happen in the context of FREEDOM and individual liberty. A FREE PLANET IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN A CLEAN PLANET.
And please, millennial types: STOP BEING SO DAMN GULLIBLE.
Yes. I think the Sun will burn out in another 4 billion years. After that, I wouldn't want to be around here any longer.
By that time the Sun will expand and become a red giant. It's likely by then that moving to a distant planet such as one of Saturn's Moon maybe a logical choice depending on how big the Sun gets. Most innermost planes like Earth, Mar will certainty be vaporized to gases.
Red Giants have the ability to add new planets and can survive a few hundreds of million years before it loses its core and then explodes to become a supernova then the solar system will be vaporized.
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