Not Just Methane: Ben Abbott on Permafrost Nitrogen

March 16, 2019

Posted by greenman3610
Filed in Crock of the Week
25 Comments »

25 Responses to “Not Just Methane: Ben Abbott on Permafrost Nitrogen”

  1. Sir Charles Says:

    March 16, 2019 at 10:59 am

    78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen. What am I getting wrong here?

    Reply
  2. Terry Donte Says:

    March 16, 2019 at 12:19 pm

    The real worry is the trolls living under that permafrost. When they come out the world is doomed.

    Hoe about ignoring the nuts who have PHd’s and look at the real problems? Pollution is a real problem in much of the world, Our pollution is a tiny fraction and is going down, much of the rest of the world pollution is going up. Africa is a cesspool, so is much of Asia. Having been in both the common idea is throw your waste in the nearest stream or outside you house and let nature worry about it. That attitude has to change.

    The other problem which is touched on indirectly on this blog is population. The world simply cannot keep increasing it population forever. That population uses up resources leaving nothing for the next generation. The increasing wealth of the world from using those resources like fresh water up is masking the long term running out. Miami, for example, has grown by using up the ground water which is causing the area to sink into the sea. Miami does have an agency to help mitigate the problem but unless somebody finds a new source of water for millions it will continue to sink.

    Reply
    • redskylite Says:

      March 16, 2019 at 4:30 pm

      People who have Phd’s have worked very hard for them and have invaluable knowledge. U.S sends much of i’s plastic waste to the poorer countries you mention and are not blameless. Take off your rose tinted glasses.

      Exports of plastic waste from the US to developing countries have surged following China’s crackdown on foreign waste imports, new research has shown.

      https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/05/huge-rise-us-plastic-waste-shipments-to-poor-countries-china-ban-thailand-malaysia-vietnam

      Reply
    • rhymeswithgoalie Says:

      March 16, 2019 at 6:25 pm

      Miami, for example, has grown by using up the ground water which is causing the area to sink into the sea.

      Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG.

      The City of Miami is built on porous limestone rock. (Miami Beach is built on barrier islands, a different story.) The water table stays high (i.e., you don’t get “cones of depression”) because it is easy for new water to move in laterally and it rains there a lot. Unfortunately, much of the new water is saline because it is intrusive seawater from the rising ocean. Even heavy buildings are built on “floating” foundations or piles driven down to even stronger rock.

      Houston, by contrast, is built on unlithified sediment. Over the decades wells there have contributed to subsidence so that many of the old towns and neighborhoods have sunk over time. Beyond that, they’re also suffering from sea-level rise and increasing rain-bombs (like the record-shattering rains of Harvey).

      California’s Central Valley is also mostly based on mostly rock, but water has been drawn down out of the aquifers so far that the dry rock is weakened and compressing.

      I’ve corrected you about Miami before, but you seem to be resistant to hydrogeological facts.

      Reply
      • dumboldguy Says:

        March 16, 2019 at 8:54 pm

        Terry has many gaps in his science knowledge and is easily distracted by irrelevancies, but he DOES have a point when he mentions population. I don’t know why we keep ignoring the climate change implications of such a rapid increase in the number of humans.

        The population of the earth was ~1.6 billion in 1900, and increased by ~200 million a decade through 1950 to ~2.5 billion.

        From 1950 through 2000, it increased by -800 million a decade, and more than doubled to ~6 billion, us now pushing 8 billion, and is projected to be near 10 billion by the mid 2050’s.

        Take a look at this excellent site, particularly at the extreme hockey stick graph of human numbers (which, by the way, looks like the temperature hockey stick). Yes, the rate of population increase HAS declined a lot, but the absolute numbers point in only one direction—hard times for many.

        http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

        Reply
    • J4Zonian Says:

      March 17, 2019 at 1:31 am

      Population growth is slowing and has been for 50 years. It’s widely expected to peak and start to decline by about 2050. Some are thinking Africa and parts of Asia will keep growing but aren’t accounting for the inevitable increase in death rates from climate catastrophe–which are extremely likely to happen in exactly those places–and very soon.

      They also aren’t considering the fact that the only groups still growing in numbers from births v. deaths are the poorest, who have virtually no effect on climate catastrophe and very little on any other global ecological problem. The richest 10% of people in the world emit half the GHGs and control a lot more. The poorest 10% emit about 1% of the GHGs, a staggering difference that’s even more stark when the richest 1% is considered. The poorest 6 billion people emit about 20% of GHGs.

      This and all our other problems are caused by the rich. Only changing the lives of the rich will fix them. They’ve demonstrated convincingly they won’t do it voluntarily; only political change will do it, and only a revolution will do it in the time we have.

      Reply
      • dumboldguy Says:

        March 17, 2019 at 11:53 am

        The population growth RATE has indeed declined, but the NUMBER of humans on the planet has increased dramatically as I outlined in earlier comments. It’s the NUMBER that is projected to peak and decline mid-century. Too bad you don’t understand the difference.

        It’s also too bad that you don’t understand that the poorest 6 billion want to live the good life that they see the richest 10% living. AND that they are NOT going to give up that dream AND that the rich aren’t going to help under any circumstances, revolution or no revolution.

        Reply
  3. redskylite Says:

    March 17, 2019 at 2:36 am

    We’ve allowed our resident Troll to deflect us completely away from Nitrogen leaching into Northern waters, into the perennial favourite “Population increase” – yes we know it’s a problem, yes it got worse after the two world wars, with the baby boom”, now declining in some countries, but not in others. Too complex to link to climate change, if we cannot get countries to accept the need to de-carbonize how can we get universal acceptance of birth control? We need to de-carbonize; the population increase is another problem, let’s divorce it from these blogs. Nitrogen dissolved into Northern waters encourages algae growth. Plus the atmospheric effects mentioned by our learned and well read “DOG”. Permafrost melts is just adding to our problems – until we stabilize GHG’s it will get worse.

    Population control is a whole damn different kettle of fish. Don’t lets go there. China tried with one child laws. War, Climate Change, disease – many dangers on a stable population. Just too complex to interlink with the climate. Let’s concentrate on the climate aspect.

    Reply
    • redskylite Says:

      March 17, 2019 at 2:49 am

      PS. Ben Abbott is a respected and useful academic of Brigham Young University, why are you even giving space to an utter despicable wanker that describes him as a nut jon – for god.s sake. You must be strong to address this horrific mess. We need people like him for the future, the future our children are striking for. Do not feed TROLLS any more.

      Reply
      • greenman3610 Says:

        March 17, 2019 at 9:05 am

        it’s a high bar to get blocked on this site – in part because keeping drooling freaks on display can be a good cautionary example for viewers, kind of like how the village drunk serves in a small town, and a reminder that Fox News kills.

        Reply
      • dumboldguy Says:

        March 17, 2019 at 9:46 am

        Surprised to see redsky sounding so angry here. He is usually much more polite in his comments and leaves the nasty talk to us “colonials”.

        A “despicable wanker” only proves himself to be exactly that (and a nut job himself) when he calls credible folks like Abbott names. Terry IS a good example of a drooling denier freak (so good that he may be a POE), and is a lot less dangerous than a NUT JOB like A Thorpe (aka A Throwup) who tries to twist science rather than just spout ignorance.

        Reply
    • dumboldguy Says:

      March 17, 2019 at 12:55 pm

      No one’s talking about birth control or population control, just the FACT that humans are living things and part of a biosphere that must obey nature’s laws, like it or not. Our rapid increase in numbers, coupled with our ability to negatively impact the environment the way no other species ever has, IS significant.

      Yes, it’s complex, but not really difficult to link to climate change. IF humans hadn’t evolved out of the hunter-gatherer stage after the last ice age, and IF they hadn’t discovered agriculture and started living in societies, and IF that hadn’t led to the industrial revolution and the massive burning of fossil fuels, we wouldn’t have had AGW (and Crock wouldn’t exist).

      We are actually making MORE progress on limiting population growth than on cutting GHG emissions, since the rate of increase has gone way down for humans while GHG’s have risen, but we can’t ignore the fact that there are too many of us for the earth to support in the “western” high-consumption lifestyle—-that is the problem, and it WILL be solved to some extent when CAGW kills off several billion humans and sends many of the rest back to a more primitive, less consumptive lifestyle. Balance of a sort will be restored, and the new biosphere can begin to evolve and stabilize (provided we haven’t thrown too many nuclear weapons around, which would slow things WAY down).

      Reply
  4. lokisrevengeblog Says:

    March 17, 2019 at 5:53 am

    *How Chemical Use Is Turning Us Into Feminized Morons*
    Of the 345 million tonnes of chemicals consumed in the Europe, 62% posed a health hazard including, formaldehyde in shampoo, microbeads in toothpaste, phthalates in food packaging, and flame retardants in many household goods.
    Chemical use will grow *7x faster* than population between 1990 and 2030.

    Global chemical production almost doubled from 2000 – 2018.

    Global chemical production will almost double again from 2017 – 2030.

    China is forecast to account for 49.9% of the world market.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/12/surge-in-chemical-use-a-threat-to-health-and-environment

    *Male Penises Shrinking ☆ All Vertebrate Males Turning Female ☆ No Sperm 2060*

    https://lokisrevengeblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/ecological-policy-failure-humanitys-greatest-mistake/

    Reply
  5. indy222 Says:

    March 17, 2019 at 2:14 pm

    “…the more we learn, the more we see how little we understand” – Ben Abbott.

    But the more we learn, the more we see the science is more dire and apocalyptic than we thought, and helps to explain the many rapid climate change episodes even in the relatively recent past, in the paleo ice records (D-O events, for example). I’d like to see Michael Mann get off the meme of “let’s not scare people or they won’t do anything at all”. If we’re truly a species who will do only
    (a) a little, as long as it only costs us a negligible amount, or
    (b) nothing at all, because we’re scared and might as well accept our doom…

    …then yeah, what’s the point? We’re doomed anyway and why bother to communicate at all, Michael? I say, the scientists should be giving us the MIDDLE of the expected changes, including all the neglected physics from prior IPCC reports, and then guesstimated error bars. Not mild mannered hopeful predictions and then let the horrific middle (Hansen’s work, MacDougall et al, Friedrich et al, etc.) be cast as some sort of outlier we shouldn’t mention lest we depress people into lethargy. Hell, we’ve been IN lethargy for ever, and continue in it. We need a good (realistic) scare to have any hope of rising to the occasion.

    Reply

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