Questions tagged [climate-change]
Questions about changes of the climate system, including questions about global warming.
533
questions
6
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1answer
218 views
What exactly is “Land-Use Change and Forestry”?
What exactly is "Land-Use Change and Forestry" and why is it sometimes hugely positive (Indonesia) but sometimes hugely negative (China)? Isn't it supposed to be a type of source not sink (...
3
votes
1answer
43 views
Are small reductions in CO2 emissions better than no reductions, in terms of mitigating climate change?
My understanding of climate change is that a large increase in human-caused CO2 emissions is likely to lead to large change in the Earth's climate through a global warming effect. Scientific consensus ...
2
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1answer
47 views
If we send ocean waters into glacier of north pole/south pole to reduce sea level, will it help global warming?
this is my first time posting in Earth Science, please be gentle to me.
I am Science Enthusiast, though numbers are my enemies for now so I can't come up with formulas or any form of calculations. ...
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0answers
36 views
Best realistic-case scenario, what does our climate look like in 30 years…50 years…a 100 years?
Let's assume, humanity can decide to care more about the survival of our species, our duty to our descendants, than getting rich now. How long would it reasonably take to get to net-zero carbon ...
2
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0answers
30 views
What effect would a slowdown of the AMOC have in particular on North America's climate/weather?
From what I know so far, a slowdown/shutdown in the gulf stream would cause climate change to run counter to the way that it would normally progress (i.e. poles warming faster than the tropics.) Warm ...
3
votes
1answer
87 views
Is it possible to actually stop climate change, or the only thing we can do is to slow it down?
When I was researching some materials (e.g. this article in Scientific American) regarding the possible ways to fight climate change, I noticed that almost all suggestions look not like the solutions ...
1
vote
1answer
79 views
How likely is it for coastal cities to survive next 40 years? [closed]
I live in a coastal city myself and I know there are many measures taken to prevent harm for city buildings from sea waters. I'm not aware of all of them and I wonder if modern cities actually have a ...
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2answers
227 views
How are we going to handle oxygen shortage problem arising due to massive usage of current fossil fuel combustion and future Hydrogen fuel cell tech?
This question is being redirected from the Chemistry Stack Exchange community.
The current corona pandemic has created a situation where in order to save lives, there is a huge huge requirement for ...
5
votes
1answer
107 views
How much would weather data from ocean-going vessels improve climate research?
I would like to know how good the weather data coverage is on the surface of the world’s oceans, and how much it would improve climate research/models if weather observations from ocean-going vessels ...
4
votes
1answer
114 views
As the number of ocean dead zones increases, is the world's primary source of atmospheric oxygen (phytoplankton) at risk?
Disclaimer: I am not a scientist.
I was wondering if there is a concern that the world will run out of breathable atmospheric oxygen as the number of dead zones in the ocean increases with global ...
2
votes
1answer
196 views
Who are winners from the global warming? Are there any?
As a person living in Russia, I always had mixed feelings when hearing appeals to fight global warming. On the one hand, I completely understand that it is going to be a disaster for lots of people. ...
3
votes
2answers
132 views
Are wetlands effective against climate change?
In the region where I live, there is a trend that conservation organizations are advocating the conservation and re-valuation of wetlands.
Aside from boosting biodiversity and providing other ...
3
votes
1answer
70 views
Connection between radiative imbalance and radiative forcing
There seems to be a general consensus that the Earth is in radiative imbalance, i.e., it is absorbing more solar energy than it radiates. One figure I've seen bandied about for this imbalance is that ...
2
votes
1answer
72 views
Trees cleaning the air
Sorry if this is the wrong place...
I have been camping a lot recently and I couldn't help but notice some of the campgrounds I am in are acres and acres of mostly pine trees. These trees have very ...
2
votes
1answer
105 views
What are the risks of developing geoengineering?
Wikipedia page for geoengineering entry list a lot of proposals to decrease global temperature:
Solar radiation management methods[5] may include:
Surface-based: for example, surface-based mirror ...
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0answers
32 views
When it comes the average lifetime of chemicals in the atmosphere, is the mean lifetime ~1.4427 times the half-life? As with radioactivity?
There are so many websites giving numbers for 'average' lifetimes of global-warming or ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere, yet they are rarely explicit in their definition(s)...
For instance, ...
0
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1answer
83 views
Will a new glacial age take place on Earth or Holocene will become a new climatic epoch?
Pleistocene shows a switch between glacial and interglacial ages.
Image source: global-climate-change.org.uk
However, humanity is burning fossil fuels and increasing atmosphere's $\ce{CO2}$ content.
...
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0answers
33 views
How is causality between past CO2 levels and fossilized plant spore proxies established?
According to Mann and Kump (2015),
Geologic proxies are characteristics of sedimentary rocks that we can
use to infer ancient environmental conditions. Climate scientists
study proxies because there ...
7
votes
3answers
505 views
Why divide total insolation by $4$?
From Nature:
We divide by $4$ since the solar energy is spread over the surface of the planetary sphere. The Earth intercepts a circular area of incoming sunlight, and this area is spread over a ...
2
votes
1answer
91 views
How to get the exact temperature from 1880 to 2020? [closed]
Wherever I look, I find "Temperature Anamolies" which I assume is an annual temperature change relative to the previous year.
If I wanted to find the exact temperatures (based on NASA's ...
1
vote
1answer
96 views
Is it possible to kickstart an hypothetical frozen earth with 0.6 ice albedo to an earth with an atmosphere, with just the sun at current distance?
Phase change of water at different pressures and temperatures tell us that with no atmospheric pressure 200 Kelvin (minus 73 Celcius) is enough to turn ice into vapor directly
Wouldn't that suggest ...
1
vote
1answer
26 views
How do geologists measure green house gass emmissions from large regions
I read here that volcanoes release about "0.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year". I wonder though, how scientists can estimate the emissions from large regions with geological ...
7
votes
1answer
111 views
Why is it that “With higher CO2, the dry gets drier and the wet gets wetter”?
The Phys.org article CO2 dip may have helped dinosaurs walk from South America to Greenland quotes Dennis Kent, "adjunct research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth ...
2
votes
3answers
96 views
Is a hotter climate making trees grow faster and have lighter wood?
I started thinking about this after seeing several articles about falling trees, in particular a few articles about very large trees falling in Los Angeles and New York City. Plus, just thinking about ...
2
votes
2answers
101 views
Why has the Earth's average sea level risen 'only' by nine inches after one degree C increase in temperature?
I am only doing gross calculations here, but...
If the Earth has warmed by about one degree Celsius in the last century or so, and the thermal expansion coefficient of water is about .0002085, then ...
3
votes
1answer
67 views
How to measure global temperature?
people always talk about global temperature (such as the global temperature goal of 1,5 K) - but how is this value achieved? It seems to me that it clearly depends on where the measuring stations are, ...
2
votes
2answers
143 views
What are the evidences that the earth climate is getting warmer?
Someone, who does not believe climate change asked me today --
How is it possible for us to conclude that the past five years are the hottest five years since record begun, since
There are only a ...
3
votes
2answers
54 views
Would climate change result in an increase in seismic activities?
Would climate change result in an increase in seismic activities?
I can see two potential forces acting:
Temperature dilation of the Earth's surface.
A change in the distribution of water mass, fewer ...
4
votes
0answers
98 views
Is there scientific consensus on the existence of the iris effect
Question:
Is there scientific consensus on the existence of the Iris Effect and whether it is a positive or negative feedback mechanism? If so, can you refer to a recent publication?
Background:
In ...
1
vote
1answer
39 views
What potential geoengineering technologies could help a country “achieve its Paris (agreement) targets”?
CNN's China to expand weather modification program to cover area larger than India ends with the following sentence:
"While China has not yet shown signs of 'unilaterally' deploying ...
4
votes
1answer
97 views
Climate change impact / risk assessment
I work for a local council in the UK. We want to include climate change as a mandatory consideration in all of our decision making. This would require project managers to look at the risk (what ...
3
votes
2answers
79 views
How much wind power is there roughly in Britain and its surrounding?
Given the prominence of the climate crisis, it's important to get some estimates of how much wind power is available in Britain as part of a renewably energised future.
Q. What is yearly average of ...
1
vote
1answer
83 views
It is possible to reduce global sea level via filling empty lowlands with ocean water? [duplicate]
There are empty lowlands in Australia and Iran like Dasht-e Lut. If we fill these lands with ocean water then could we reduce the global sea level and save coastal cities like venice?
4
votes
2answers
115 views
What effect does climate change have on the Earth's rotation?
I recently read a blog entry from a leap-second expert explaining that in near term (i.e. last 3 years) the Earth has been spinning ever so slightly faster, delaying the need to insert a leap-second (...
4
votes
1answer
39 views
How far would average sea level rise from a 25% increase in total ocean volume?
What amount of average sea level rise (in meters above 2020 levels) would be associated with a 25% increase in total ocean volume?
The reason I ask is because of this study that indicates Earth has ...
3
votes
0answers
47 views
How would you predict the future climate with only 7 years of interest?
In my specific case, I have worked with a data set from 2001 to 2018 which had to be split up in 2012 due to major updates in the data. Therefore, I am now dealing with a data set of 12 years (2001 to ...
3
votes
1answer
331 views
Which type of plant absorbs the most net carbon dioxide per year per square km?
The answer to How many trees would I have to plant to solve Global Warming? demonstrates how unviable it would be to simply plant trees to counter climate change (we'd need to plant ~60 millions km$^2$...
3
votes
2answers
56 views
What part does methane play in the process of producing biogas?
I should point out first that I don't know the first thing about environmental science, I study mathematics, and the reason I am asking this question is because I want to understand the processes ...
3
votes
3answers
75 views
To what degree does historical measurement inaccuracies contribute to climate change models?
Often the graphs depicting the earth's historical temperature, the time axis extends well over couple of centuries. Also there are few that extends over thousands of years.
I wonder to what degree the ...
4
votes
1answer
94 views
Will global warming expand the tropical zone
It is widely known (to the general audience, I'm not a climatologist) that global warming will let the desert climates migrate further away from the equator towards the poles, such that the South of ...
3
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0answers
47 views
Has the research into the apparent “Pause” in GMSTs produced a substantially better explanation?
Zeke Hausfather tweets
Just six years ago many in the scientific community were obsessing
over the apparent "pause" or "hiatus" in surface temperatures. It
famously made it into ...
3
votes
2answers
102 views
Would the climate still rise when we reduce our carbon footprint down to zero?
Every electrical device consumes electric energy and almost every one of them I can think of produces heat as a byproduct. This also applies on every kind of machine powered vehicle. Even our bodies ...
3
votes
2answers
97 views
IPCC digital references
I'm tidying my citations for my thesis, and I'm facing the task of sorting out the references for the IPCC reports (all of which have very long lists of authors).
Does anybody know where there are any ...
1
vote
1answer
47 views
How much of the Earth's surface was covered with water during the Mesozoic?
When the Earth was at its warmest, and there were no ice caps at all, not even during the winter, and thermal expansion meant a certain amount of water took up more space, what ratio of Earth's ...
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votes
1answer
123 views
Has irreversible global warming already begun? [duplicate]
Climate is a high order nonlinear dynamic system and as such:
is complex to study
is not controllable via linear input as in we pollute less -> temperature drops...
0
votes
2answers
73 views
Forest fuel biochar burial
Record fires are blazing in the west coast, huge even compared to California's notorious summers.
Dead plants and debris are crucial to get a fire started. This debris could be collected, carbonized, ...
4
votes
0answers
77 views
Dynamic of glacier retreat? (here: in Greenland)
During the last years I have taken many pictures of obviously retreating glaciers and empty moraines in Greenland - just like this one. Looks devastating, actually.
In my understanding, the current ...
10
votes
8answers
3k views
Could an icy/extremely-cold asteroid/comet ever strike and cool the Earth?
This is obviously an imaginary question, but it seems like something computable (which I don't have the mathematical ability to do so unfortunately). P.S. I do not have in-depth knowledge about comet/...
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0answers
40 views
Are events like the Siberian heat wave factored into models of sea ice decline?
I've been looking at a lot of charts of Arctic Sea Ice lately, wondering when it will be gone, and whether the more extreme predictions are credible.
When scientists come up with a chart that points ...
0
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0answers
47 views
South Georgia Island and Settlement
I know there were settlements in South Georgia in the past, but they were all abandoned. Is there any environmental reason why a new settlement could not be made? Especially with global warming, the ...
