Climate Change

[Bear]

Not getting into politics here. Although technical mitigation possibilities are definitely a good thing to share if you know any. 

Yesterday rain fell on Greenland's ice sheet for the first time in at least the last thirteen thousand years.  So they tell us, although there may have been a couple episodes that didn't leave any evidence they've ever found (ie if there were rainfalls before now, they didn't melt even one or two annual ice layers, which the current rain already did).

You pretty much can't have an ice sheet if rain falls on it.  At least not if the rain becomes a regular thing that happens more than once a decade or so.  Ice sheets accumulate on top and then either they slide into the ocean or melt from the bottom with geothermal heat. If there's any surface melting, it's supposed to just refreeze and make a crust. If the water actually runs off, the ice sheet shrinks from the top and bottom both.

The world looks different if Greenland doesn't have an ice sheet.

[Vitto]

Considering that the best way to mitigate climate change at the current state of the art is changing our lifestyle I fear is impossible to not get political on this topic...


IMHO this is one of the topic that is not touched a lot in the early history of OA and considering it's going to be, probably, the most pressing topic of this century I find it pretty annoying but I recognize that the range of possible outcomes for 2100 variates wildly.

In the end, I fear, we will get to the point to use some form of solar geoengineering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering


If we get AIs around 2050's as OA calendar (I'd say 2150 but let's stay optimistic!) I guess they will be put on a tour the force to solve climate change and nuclear fusion.

[Drashner1]

IMHO this is one of the topic that is not touched a lot in the early history of OA and considering it's going to be, probably, the most pressing topic of this century I find it pretty annoying but I recognize that the range of possible outcomes for 2100 variates wildly.

I'm not sure how 'a lot' is defined in this context, but we do have these articles:

LINK

LINK

LINK

LINK

There's also passing mention about conditions on Earth in this article - LINK

And of course the entire Great Expulsion is basically a reaction against human treatment of the biosphere, of which climate changes is presumably the largest example.

It should also be noted that the bulk of the setting is set thousands of years after the issue of global climate change on Earth was resolved. So it actually makes sense it's not something we cover in any great detail.

Todd

[Vitto]

I'm not sure how 'a lot' is defined in this context, but we do have these articles:

I admit that I didn't remember at all to had read the "Climate change on Old Earth" article until I saw the image of the archology halfway throught it

[Bear]

In my own manuscripts the carbon crisis has most people living in below-grade or earth-sheltered housing in about a hundred years from now.  Entire communities and cities underground in about 200 years.   And then Yellowstone erupts putting a bunch more nails in the Carbon Crisis and it takes them a long time to recover.  But they do, and eventually Earth is a nice place again, and that lasts for ~600 years.  And then there's a biological warfare event that goes far FAR worse than anybody wants it to and wipes out all eukaryotes.  Including all the people who know what the fight was even about.

The book takes place in the Post-Eschatonic Era, which follows the last, or Anthropocene, age of the Holocene Era, and focuses on the descendants of people who were out of town at the time and missed the end of the world.

Incidentally, I should clarify that I think I'm being pretty optimistic about Earth's future. Having this place in even a marginally useful or livable state for more than another thousand years is better than I actually expect.

Bear