Comments 1 to 4:

1. Philip at 22:49 PM on 12 April, 2019

   Imagine we would have evolved just a million years ago , do you think climate would have changed ? To what it is now ? Climate has been changing, is changing , and will always be changing untill our sun becomes a red star. We can't even predict the weather correctly for the next month . And you are talking about predicting the weather in 2100 ? The best way to go is nuclear power, solar and wind is a strain on the environment . Nuclear thorium power , that is.  I am far more worried about platstics everywhere in the food chain.

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   Moderator Response:

   [DB] Sloganeering, off-topic, logical fallacies and disinformation snipped.  Please familiarize yourself with this site's Comments Policy and comport future comments to comply with it.

2. Brentkn at 05:43 AM on 13 April, 2019

   Okay.
   This year the Arctic is expected to become ice free.
   When that happens the polar air will shift to Greenland where there still is ice. This will dramtically change the jet streams in the northern hemisphere and we can expect to see even more wild weather extremes.
   But that is not the biggest threat.
   Warmer air will move into the Arctic region which just so happens to be surrounded by permafrost. There is enough greenhouse gases in the permafrost to triple what we currently have in our atmosphere. It is over 7 times more than what we have emitted with the burning of fossil fuels in the last 300 years.
   In the seabed below the Arctic ocean there are vast reserves of methane hydrates that can destabilize from the water warming up. Just 1% of that being released will cause a global extinction.
   The President of Finland has already stated that if we lose the Arctic, we lose the world.
   When the Arctic loses all of it's ice, it will be like turning off the air conditioner in the Northern Hemisphere during the hottest time of the year.
   Temperatures will very quickly climb by as much as 18°C in just a decade.
   We will see a 4-5°C rise in just 3 years. A 3°C rise is probably enough to kill off most humans.
   It's not the temperature rise that will kill us but the speed in which it happens.
   Whereas humans have proven to be versatile with temperature change, the species that we depend on for food and the air we breathe are not so resilient to temperature changes.
   Even if we could somehow survive the extreme heatwave events during the summer months, we would still need food, clean water and an atmosphere with at least 19% oxygen content.
   Sorry folks but the oxygen content is also falling. That is to be expected when we chop down the trees that provide the oxygen. Wildfires will destroy the rest as well as convert some of the oxygen to CO2.
   Can the world really change in 81 years?
   Just in the last 40 years there has been a loss of 60% of the world's wildlife. It's not going to take another 40 years for the rest to die off.
   81 years is more than enough time for the world to change.

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   Moderator Response:

   [DB] "This year the Arctic is expected to become ice free"

   That's not what the science tells us to expect.  Pretty much most of what you wrote after that is nonsense.  This is not the venue for you, if you're going to engage in speculation and fearmongering.
   
   Rhetoric and sloganeering snipped.

3. Curtain Eater at 21:40 PM on 14 September, 2019

   This is basically just curiosity regarding science, (I'm a high school chemistry student so I apologize if this comment seems really stupid) but salt lowers the freezing point of water, right? So when ice melts and sea levels rise, would that make it less likely for example, for ice caps to re-freeze at a hypothetical future time? And if in our future there's some wild devised way to "clean" air, where would the pollutants go? Like let's say, hypothetically, a device is created that "scrubs" air of pollutants, what would be done with it? Sort of like when you shampoo your carpet and get rid of the dirty water afterwards I guess. I'm really just spitballing if I'm being honest, because with ADHD I have so much natural curiosity. But could that "dirty water" scrubbed from the air be put in some kind of small, pressurized capsule, and released into space? How do pollutants affect a vacuum? I don't know how that really works.

   Additionally, if ways to regress are eventually devised, still hypothetically speaking, how much of a "comeback" could even be made? If any? Some people have claimed that we're already past a "point of no return" but I don't know if that's credible. Can there even be a point of no return? What determines "no return"? 

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4. michael sweet at 22:32 PM on 15 September, 2019

   Curtain eater,

   In general it is better to ask one question in one post and make another post to ask another question.  Use the search function in the upper left to find posts that address your questions.  Often existing posts answer your question.  OP's usually have more information than comments.

   The ocean is so big that if all the ice sheets melt the ocean will still be the same salinity as it is today.  The question is how long it might be before it gets cold enough for the sheets to reform.  That may be 100,000 years or longer.  Climate changes today are essentially permanent for future people.

   There is too much pollution to launch it into space.  There are people who think carbon dioxide can be injected into the Earth to get rid of it.  Other pollutants would need to be dealt with differently.  The job of injecting carbon dioxide into the Earth is so large that many people feel it is impossible.  It would at least be very expensive.

   The quesion of "no return" depends on how you ask it.  If you want to return to the climate of 1900 than it may be too late to do anything in your lifetime.  It may be possible to return to 1900 in a few hundred years at great expense.  Who will pay for it?  If you want to return to the climate of 2015 that would be cheaper (although very expensive).

   The bottom line for me is what climate is best.  In general, the best climate is the one you are used to.  Rapid change in climate is bad because you are not used to it.  For example, farmers grow crops that require certain temperatures and rain patterns.  If the climate shifts than farmers have to grow different foods and will not have the right equipment for the new crops. 

   If it gets hot enough many tropical areas will be too hot to live in.  Where will all the people who live there move?  We may have passed the point where hundreds of millions of people have to move to survive.  One million people moving from Syria caused huge problems in Europe.  How much would people like seeing 100 million people moving? 

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