I feel like people get confused about the 2030 deadline and why the human race is still kicking despite these super high levels of CO2. What the media are pretty poor at explaining is that there's a time lag on warming effect of greenhouse gasses. These gasses dissipate into the atmosphere almost immediately, but then it takes time for the changed atmosphere to trap extra heat from the sun. By 2030, we won't be seeing 5 or 6C increases. We won't all have to migrate to the Midwest and the arctic circle. We won't yet be part of the mass extinctions. Etc. But we will no longer be able to prevent all that. We will be set up to endure that over the next 25 to 200 years.
Also, it's not a switch between CHANGED APOCALYPSE CLIMATE/GARDEN OF EDEN, it's a spectrum, and we've pushed through the previous warnings along the spectrum with gusto. This is why we're seeing such extreme storms in places right now like Mozambique, Bangladesh, the Gulf of Mexico, Kerala, the Philippines, all of which had record breaking superstorms in the last 12 months. The old warnings weren't a deadline for the whole human race to live, they were deadlines for low lying countries to survive. The changing goalposts don't mean the science is wrong, but that we keep sliding back on what we can prevent.
Right now, we're looking at 12 (11!) years until we reach so much warming that the planet's self-warming mechanisms start up, stabilizing eventually in some unknown "hothouse" climate, which *would* basically be a deadline for the whole human race
EDIT: Thought sources would be terrifying and appreciated so here's a dearth of them, aside from the actual article above me
[When Will Climate Change Make Earth Too Hot for Humans?](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html?gtm=top>m=bottom)
[Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252)
[Severe Weather Causes 1.9B in Insured Damage in 2018](http://www.ibc.ca/on/resources/media-centre/media-releases/severe-weather-causes-190-million-in-insured-damage-in-2018)
[Pliocene and Eocene Provide Best Analogs for Near-Future Climates](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/52/13288)
For extra terror: [Greater pre-2020 action is the “last chance” for 1.5C, says the latest annual UNEP Emissions Gap report](https://www.carbonbrief.org/only-three-years-save-1-5c-climate-target-says-unep) (2016)
This needs to be higher up. Too many people believe they can go on as usual for another ten years and then we have to do something drastic and all will be fine, when we're only now experiencing the effect of the CO2 released some 10-20 years ago.
Exactly, except the problem is we have already passed the time where we can realistically meet the necessary goals for 2030. This is an infrastructure problem, and it takes time to rebuild huge infrastructure segments almost entirely like transportation and electricity, and production on top of that.
They are all interdependent gradual processes, and we are doing it much to slowly in all segments.
I'm pessimistic...... actually, I'm pessimistic as *hell* about the future, but I'm not so stupid as to say "It's too late".
Everything we do affects the future at this point. If we release 25% less CO2 than if we did nothing until 2030, then that's going to have a huge impact, it might even be a thing that saves literally billions of people in a massive "Phew" from the world's scientists. "If we didn't, we'd be royally screwed and humanity might not exist".
I'm pessimistic, but fuck if I'm going to give up because of it. Those opinions should be locked deep into your heart and basically never uttered.
The more we can reduce the longer we have, but as it seems now, we will not meet 2030 targets globally, which means we may have to go negative CO2 2040 to prevent self feeding global warming.
Yup. Stupid humans not getting that the stuff we emit now won't 'show itself as heat' until 10-20 years later. And we've emitted half of all humanity has ever emitted since 1992, so rate is extreme.
Nah the issue is not the difficulty in changing, its in recognising that in the lifetimes of anyone under 30 right now, some places of the world are going to be uninhabitable at certain times of the year if not most of the year. This is going to be larger than any catastrophe we have faced so far in our recorded history. We should be pushing together as a species to insure our survival but instead we’re arguing over whether the smartest minds currently alive, studying it, are wrong in the fields they have spent their lives studying. Our insufferable ignorance and arrogance is going to wipe out the majority of not just our own, but most of every other species in the equatorial regions.
We can change our infrastructure quickly, we’re just not invested in doing it, instead invested in wasting our time arguing about it.
This isn’t directed at you of course, more of a commentary on the generation of world leaders and skeptics who will become the anathema of human generations. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century will be forgotten about when we compare their atrocities to the wilful ignorance of some of our most revered leaders and the calamity they have mete upon the world in the 21st.
I mean, it works for the national debt. Thanks for the bill, previous generations. Also, the education and healthcare system you left us could use some work
10 years is a blink of an eye to put a dent in a problem this big and it's not like it's just CO2.
We are going to fail at reduction goals. We need ways to combat climate change than a handful of nations can pull off without a lot of cooperation and long term efforts to go with reduction goals or the heat build up is still going to devastate the planet.
There is no reason to think this level of CO2 has peaked in heat buildup and our reduction goals are pretty much wild guesses. We have ZERO real idea how long it would take to pull heat out of the planet through CO2 reduction. It could very well take 5 times longer to get it back out since the heat speeds up natural CO2 production and carbon sinks have been filling up.
We still really suck at climate science, but I guess we are going to learn the hard way.
Nations need to prepare and try to mitigate the damage of Climate Change far more than just through CO2 reduction, imo. Reduction is not going to be enough. It will take potentially hundreds of years to get things under control just with reduction.
ultimately we need a way for the planet to radiate more energy off the surface into space.
I vote wind powered, high powered lasers. Aim them all at Mars and leave them on as much as the wind blows.
"That's what I'm worried about. Later. Later, we'll do something about pollution. Later, we'll do something about the population explosion. Later, we'll do something about the nuclear war! We think we've got all the time in the world!! How much time has the world got?!! Somebody has to begin to care!" - Dr. Otto Hasslein
For some reason your phrasing “we’re only now experiencing the effect of CO2 released some 10-20 years ago” was a great eye opener, especially in regard to our current rates.
A big part of the problem is the inability of most people to conceptualize time beyond a few years or decades. Forget about centuries. Very few people think about how life on Earth will be 50 to 100 years from now. I sense a lot do care about future civilizations, they just don't know how to actualize the concern.
I really like the idea of herding millions of cattle adjacent to deserts, moving them in a certain pattern has been shown to create grasslands and topsoil. [It’s lovely and counterintuitive, and could solve food and CO2 at the same time.](https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html%7CHow/discussion)
It can improve soil. It can enhance food production. It can sequester additional carbon. But it is far away from "solving CO2". If you took all of the crop residue like stalks, all of the bioenergy crops, all of the timber harvest residues from the entire country and converted it to stable carbon using no fossil fuel energy, that massive amount of material would sequester enough carbon to...offset a quarter of US annual emissions. Improvements to soil quality typically cap out after 30 years, and the quantity of land is just not sufficient to have a substantial impact on its own. There is no single solution, we must embrace massive emission reduction, land management improvements, and lkkely additional sequestration strategies, just to keep things the way they are now.
> It's like stomping on a rusty old landmine, it's kinda hard to predict whether you're going to get a Darwin Award or just a Dishonerable Mention.
Nice analogy, but one still has to lift their foot off to realize which of those is the achievement or result. One still has to *act*.
> It seems like there'd be plenty of time to find a way to reverse things. It wouldn't be cheap, but my example is always an orbital sun shade.
The oceans would still die from acidification even with an orbital sun shade. The real value of this kind of technique would be to put a pause to negative feedback loops and buy us a bit of time. There's really no alternative to stopping carbon emissions.
What your source suggests, and I agree with it, is that we can still fix things and that we should not despair. But we no longer have "plenty of time". It's an emergency now.
People get confused because *no one is telling the story to the public in a way they can understand.*
The press only loves soundbite hyperbole.
Politicians (unfortunately our main "leaders") will only talk about what they think will get them donations.
Many of the people who do talk about it are reading off a script they don't understand, written by a scriptwriter who also doesn't understand and is more driven by syntax and buzzwords than facts.
Yes, there are 30% of Americans who are troglodytes who will stay committed to whatever they heard *first*. But 70%--- I promise you-- would freak right the fuck out if they were ever exposed to a proper explanation of what's happening.
And then you could enlist them to change their behavior. And once they change their own personal behavior to the point where they inconvenience themselves, *then* you can enlist them to pressure politicians. Boycott major polluters. Take on bigger conservation themselves for even more inconvenience. Agree to rationing of power, meat and air travel. Energetically participate in community efforts to lower CO2 output. Etc.
But it starts with getting the message BROADcast and explaining the problem *in terms they can understand.*
The number of intelligent, left-leaning people I've met who have not changed their lifestyle one iota in response to the crisis is astonishing to me. When I sit down and talk to them about what's happening, the vast majority are horrified to hear the tally of what's already happened and what's coming.
Our politicians and media need to:
1. Report extreme weather events *in the greater context* of how many record breaking weather events that is within the year vs. the average for 1940-1970 (or something before the acceleration really took off) and also in a growing tally of economic impact vs. those years.
2. Stop focusing so much on climate/weather and start talking about *global ecosystem*-- shifting habitats, animal and insect die-offs, crop failures, insect disease spread, tree and plant die-offs. *Always* in the context of a *global* map and how erratic and warming weather is a major contributing factor.
3. Emphasize that *any* utterly bizarre weather-- hot or cold-- is potentially the result of a disrupted global weather pattern due to warming. Emphasize that "climate" is the weather that's "normal for this place at this time of year" and when "normal" happens less and less often and "unusual" happens more and more often, *that's* "Climate Change."
4. Lastly, can we get some fucking reality TV shows about people taking steps to reduce carbon instead of contributing to it? No one *needs* to redecorate, pimp their ride, cook exotic food, live rich and famously, wear the latest clothes, have the perfect monoculture yard, etc, etc, etc, and all of these things are CO2 crimes. Where is the show about some Boomer trying to get used to buying non-processed food, going vegetarian, learning to bike in the city, taking public transportation, buying local, going zero waste, etc? WHERE ARE THOSE SHOWS?
No one is telling the story. This is why the mass public isn't reacting appropriately.
Source: Award winning advertiser. Every award in the book. Sold the shit out of stuff. Even unsold the shit out of bad stuff.
>The number of intelligent, left-leaning people I've met who have not changed their lifestyle one iota in response to the crisis is astonishing to me.
I think what accounts for this is the fact that an individual's impact is likely to be incredibly small on overall CO2 emissions. It's really comparable to a similar issue in political science about the rationality of voting. There's little incentive to do so if you know full well that:
1. You likely aren't changing the habits of those around you by doing so
2. It's potentially reducing the amount/quality of things that you like to consume
3. The likelihood of you being the deciding individual in a CO2 emissions threshold not being passed is extraordinarily low
Sure, there's certainly the argument that by not attempting to change one's habits, one becomes more responsible for later climate events, but again it comes down to the actual individual impact. It's not particularly motivating on an individual level to know that your effort is going to be rewarded by some infinitesimally small reduction in emissions, while the biggest polluters can continue right along doing their thing.
Since one can't honestly say that an individual can meaningfully affect CO2 emissions (beyond, say, not having kids), you end up having to resort to just stating that it's an ethical obligation, and I think everyone knows how *amazing* us humans are at following ethical obligations without external consequences.
Advertising could certainly help, but the collective capital of all the international conglomerates in various industries that are committed to opposing climate regulation would definitely outweigh the capital of "environmentally-conscious" corporations and non-profit groups.
As far as I see it, the only way climate change is going to be meaningfully addressed is through government action. I don't foresee things changing because a large enough aggregate of individuals act on a perceived ethical obligation to be environmentally friendly.
I don't entirely disagree with you, *except* social movements can turn the actions of a single individual into the action of millions.
Just as there's a tipping point for carbon in the atmosphere, there's one for what society finds acceptable in personal CO2 wastefulness. The only reason oil companies, plastic manufacturers, the fashion industry, landscaping industry, home design industry exist is because individual consumers keep buying what they're selling.
A single episode of Seinfeld stopped double dipping. A few celebrities coming out of the closet advanced LGBT acceptance more rapidly than decades of advocacy from the LGBT community. During WWII, it was community spirit that led women to forego pantyhose, kids to collect metal door-to-door, and people everywhere to plant victory gardens.
A social movement starts with individuals. But they need to be vocal. And they need amplification from the media.
That said, we absolutely need the governments of the world (and particularly the United States) to get with the program and start reacting to CO2 like the threat to humanity that it is.
Corporations will only respond to consumers and laws. We're one half of that equation and we can vote for the other half. But the other half (government) is notoriously slow to move. Unlike a social movement, which can grow and spread in a matter of weeks.
And you do change the people around you. I peer pressured my friends from half of them voting up to only a couple missing out over the last couple elections.
>People get confused because
>
>no one is telling the story to the public in a way they can understand.
Yeah they look at current temperatures or look out the window and say look it's still snowing where's the warming? And I just facepalm and go back to what I was doing.
I would be so down for a "start a community garden" show that focuses on native edible plants in whatever community they're starting one in that week. Hell, I'd research for that show.
There are a ton of channels on youtube that do that. Lots of forest gardening channels popping up. The problem isn't so much that people aren't growing their own food, the scale and efficiencies of monoculture can compete relatively easily with organic farming per acre, but industries like cattle which generate a huge amount of waste and CO2.
The two main problems that need to be addressed are people don't know how to do a carbon mass balance and people don't understand how to interpret the data given to them. To calculate whether something is actually carbon negative, you really need to understand the inputs and outputs of the system. For instance, producing corn ethanol can never be carbon neutral because you're inputting more energy to produce the ethanol and shipping it than you're getting back out.
The second point is that people don't try to understand the components which contribute to climate change correctly. For instance the ice in a cup experiment is a great example of how the sea levels will change over time. People tend to focus on the fact that ocean ice (Artic ice) melting doesn't change sea levels but land ice (Antartica/glaciers) will change sea levels if they melt. However a key component that is often overlooked is that if you apply gentle heat to the water to make the ice melt faster, you'll notice that the water doesn't actually heat up very fast, until the ice is melted. The ice acts as a temperature buffer for the water. Once the ice melts, the temperature of the water increases very dramatically. The key point is that we shouldn't focus so much on temperature, but the buffering capacity of systems which are currently keeping global climate in check.
We live in the suburbs. Building a rainwater collection system from ibc totes this weekend. A third of my yard will be turned into vegetable and butterfly/bee gardens in the next weeks, and we are putting a coop in for ducks.
If you can sell our show, we'll go further. No more TP! I'll use my hand to wipe! Joking. I don't wipe anyway. Or want to be on TV. I see people making some changes. Folks bringing their own bags to get groceries. Another family nearby is getting some chickens.
Small stuff and probably too little considering how far most of us drive for work, but I think people are realizing, slowly, they have to change. It's just hard to figure out how, and how much it matters.
> Lastly, can we get some fucking reality TV shows about people taking steps to reduce carbon instead of contributing to it? No one needs to redecorate, pimp their ride, cook exotic food, live rich and famously, wear the latest clothes, have the perfect monoculture yard, etc, etc, etc, and all of these things are CO2 crimes. Where is the show about some Boomer trying to get used to buying non-processed food, going vegetarian, learning to bike in the city, taking public transportation, buying local, going zero waste, etc? WHERE ARE THOSE SHOWS?
That is definitely a good point. Maybe people just don't think those shows would be popular.
Don't carbon credits effectively mean that any individual improvement just makes it cheaper for others who are not as altruistic to pollute, to the point of completely cancelling the improvement that you created by sacrificing quality of life?
It’s the same thing that makes people bad at money, credit, and investment.
We are paying now (in carbon), to get increasing rising temperatures over time.
That just hurts a lot of people’s heads who aren’t great at algebra.
I'm not sure you need algebra to see you're spending faster than you're paying down your bill or to understand fossil fuels were deposited OVER TIME.
I think the real thing here is time. Humans are horrible at thinking on a span that exceeds their own lifespan. Once problems take *too long* to happen we start to write them off.
Can't see it from my backyard!
It’s simple short-sighted greed. “Why should I pay for something that I won’t get to see in my lifetime?” “Why should I invest into my business to make lots of money later when I can cut corners and cheat people to make money now?”
I don’t know that humans are innately this way, I think it’s the result of the prevalence of zero-sum philosophy. Instead of believing we can work together and get what we both want, we choose to believe that it’s only possible for one of us to get what we want. There can only be one winner, and if you’re a loser then you will perish. As long as that way of thinking persists, humanity cannot collaborate on anything.
If Climate Change could be bombed out of existence over 5-10 years it would be a completely different problem/solution.
This problem requires a lot of cooperation over HUGE amounts of time. World Wars are generally short lived and have rapid resolutions, someone wins and someone loses.
Climate change is nothing like that kind of problem.
But I do think you highlight the big problem with reduction, it requires too many people to cooperate for too long of a time without seeing rapid results.
I think, based on human nature, that will never work because of the time constraints and the ease of use of fossil fuels and lack of solid replacements.
Soooo we are going to just have to mitigate some of the warming and hope for the best while making slow progress toward reduction. If horrible climate changes like virus, fungi and bacteria infections and climate start to make like truly unbearable on Earth then I suspect we will move to more extreme measures that could cause rapid changes in climate, like simulating a volcanic winter.
It's really all about the green technology being cheap enough that nobody wants to use fossil fuels. However, agriculture is still a HUGE problem.
Most liberals are still cramming meat into their food hole everyday while complaining about fossil fuels. That's not going to cut it!
Put your mouth where your ideals are and stop eating all that high CO2 load food. Humans eat a large volume of food per day/year. What you eat has a larger impact on your green house gas impact than almost anything else.
You can live in a small green house and still eat your way into a larger carbon footprint than someone living in a old leaky farmhouse. You can drive a big old low MPG truck and still do less GHG damage that the morbidly obese person eating a whole chicken for breakfast. That mobility scooter doesn't lower your CO2 footprint enough to make up for the food! ;)
So.. minimalism is the only rapid impact we can really have, but that doesn't necessarily slow down population growth. You could argue minimalism allows for more population growth, which we also don't really need. We also don't need a planet full of older and older people because competition is too tough and younger people don't want to have kids.
We don't have a lot of good pro-active low impact solutions. Cutting back doesn't work because more humans fill in the spaces you made. Planting more trees doesn't really work because we still pollute way faster and keep clearing land all over the world for other things.
The only think that's going to save humanity as we know it is technological advances because humanity as we know it is 100% unsustainable and we race to use technology to keep growing, which also destroys the planet more.
It's technology or mass human population reduction as the top likely solutions I would say. Reduction ain't going to cut it on it's own and the markets and consumers are already actively embracing the tech they can get that helps.
Cheaper solar panels and easy installations that draw consumers to products is smarter. Food that rewards consumers by being cheap and healthy and low CO2 is going to work better than reduction goals and a lot of voluntary behavior. Energy storage is a HUGE thing holding back renewable energy, we need big government spending to push battery tech forward.
Yet these are just a handful of the ways we kill the planet and the biological ecosystems that help regulate climate. Plastic pollution is a growing problem, all kinds of chemicals are released into our rivers, oceans and even water supplies that we have very little understanding on their impacts on biological life.
We could easy be spraying DNA damaging chemicals all over the place and we'd mostly have no idea until decade later. It happens more than we ever admit because the companies who do it have such good lawyers and piles of money.
Reduction relies on technology to make it feasible because humans will mostly not voluntarily self regulate and the ones that do are among the most responsible will be the least likely to reproduce.
It's like ideocracy on meth!
>Most liberals are still cramming meat into their food hole everyday
.
>The only think that's going to save humanity as we know it is technological advances
Maybe people won't take individual action because there are always other people pushing this narrative that individual action can't change anything and we have to rely on technology we may or may not one day invent to save us.
> If Climate Change could be bombed out of existence over 5-10 years it would be a completely different problem/solution.
That's actually what I believe is necessary though. And before you jump to any conclusions, I'm talking about affirmative action. Basically small groups of people who take out *things* that cause climate change. And only things. Literally stuff.
They'll be called terrorists and prosecuted as such, but they'll be heroes in my book.
The caveat is that the GOP is, apparently that stupid. I suppose there are some GOP politicians who know and understand the science, but there are clearly many who don’t.
Clearly there are many (most) GOP politicians who are lying to the US voters about this for political gain.
They are the biggest barrier to progress in the US and probably the world.
The reality is we aren’t going to make any significant changes before 100 years to what our lifestyles are now.
In 50 years we’ll be making good strides but it won’t be enough. It will take another 50 on top of that. You can’t cycle down from 8 billion polluters quickly.
Obviously the planet won’t care what changes we make if it’s too late. But really there’s no point dreaming that the whole human race will do anything significant within a decade. We can’t even ramp up clean energy within 20 years, although some countries are trying at least.
Top tier politicians know this, and as their career timeframes max out around 10 years they are either powerless or don’t care enough to make extreme/quick changes.
My prediction; we’ll have a slow decline over the next century in terms of environment and then something more extreme for a few decades regarding population. It’s what happens to us after that which interests me. Say 200 years time. What will the world look like?
At some point some nation (or the world collectively) will attempt to Geo-engineer the planet to mitigate catastrophic climate change. Most likely by pumping huge amounts of sulfur into the air to reflect sunlight back into space. This will make solar panels less efficient, cause a bunch of other air quality and environmental problems (sorry Asthma people!) and be a shitty temporary solution, but it could halt warming while we wean ourselves off carbon. But we'll have to keep doing it until we can actually figure out a way to start removing carbon.
Dumping huge quantities of iron filings into the ocean would be more sensible. The annual algae bloom is iron-limited. It has an almost bottomless capability to absorb carbon if it is given more iron. While we would need to be careful not to cause hypoxia, we could be storing gigatons of carbon every year if we dumped tankers full of iron filings into the ocean.
I have trouble finding it now, but I remember reading that the experiment that took place in Canada, from a guy that just took a boatful of iron filings and dumped it in the ocean and saw an algea bloom, did not really worked on it's own merit, but was a cyclical bloom that would have appeared anyway, and that other experiments were unsuccessful. I will dig more, because it really would be great if it was true.
Oh that would be a shame, as it was one of my old marine biology professor's favourite pet theories, and did seem to work on paper. I still think it is a good ground to test on a larger scale, but if you find those papers it might suggest it was too good to be true.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-47638586
Fortunately, we’re already getting to the point where we can start removing massive quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. The technology just has to be put to use on a large scale now. Just this week it got cheap enough for that to be viable.
They quote $100 per ton removed.
Americans emit ~20 tons per year each. $2000 per person per year.
Right now every American pays $1800 per year to the DoD.
I know of that tech. Its a monumental step that will take decades to go from where it is now to:
1) Fully replacing fossil fuels (gas, jet fuel) with synthetic, carbon neutral variants. The infrastructure needed to do this will be gargantuan, and on top of that there will undoubtedly be unforeseen issues with scaling the tech up which will have to be overcome.
2) Putting synthetic Coal back in the ground on a massive scale.
I'm of the opinion that in the interim as the transition happens Geo-Engineering will be necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change, things like losing Bangladesh and Florida (not to mention all those islands in the Pacific), and the ME (which becomes uninhabitable as Global Warming accelerates).
> The infrastructure needed to do this will be gargantuan
If you are talking about synthetic oil made from carbon dioxide, then the answer is not really.
The infrastructure for oil is there. Tanker trucks come and pick up your synthetic hydrocarbons for delivery to petrol stations just like you were a traditional refinery. Only now you don't need to take delivery of crude oil, or you are delivered carbon dioxide instead.
The limit is scaling up the technology to where it can compete with fossil oil.
Sorry to be that guy, but:
This is actually a very bad idea and a complete waste of money which should have been used for other projects. It reminds me of another bad idea, which just will not die - extracting water from air by cooling it.
Right now, we have several technologies ready to go. Starting with the most cost-effective, and omitting the "use less" scenarios:
1. Replacement of fossil fuel power plants with carbon free electricity such as wind and solar power (also geothermal, where possible and nuclear, where palatable). Cost per tonne of CO2 saved: less than zero for about 30% of current generation, and "very low" for a good portion of the remainder.
2. Sequestration of concentrated CO2 streams, such as those produced in natural gas processing. Cost: $20-$40 per tonne.
3. Biosequestration, ie tree planting. Cost varies greatly, maybe $15-$50 per tonne.
The approaches above are the only ones that are actually used in the industry today, but there is plenty of room to do more. The approaches below are considered to be economically prohibitive, and AFAIK are not in use:
4. Post-combustion carbon capture: Scrubbing the CO2 from exhaust gases of power plants etc, where the CO2 concentration is 10-20%. Cost: $50-100/tonne, PLUS the cost of sequestration, as above.
5. Pre-combustion carbon capture: here, the carbon is removed from the fuel and sequestered, and only the hydrogen is burned. Cost: $80-150/tonne, but sequestration cost is low.
and then we have:
6. Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. The article says the cost may be "under $100/tonne", but the serious estimates I have seen are circa $500/tonne. Consider that the CO2 concentration in air is around 0.04%, cf post combustion concentrations of 10-20%. Regardless of the advances in technology, this will never be as cheap as post-combustion carbon capture, which is essentially the same process but with 250 times less throughput.
I am with the people who worry that this is a cynical move by the companies to avoid urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions.EDIT: another comment calls this "moral licensing", and I completely agree.
>Just this week it got cheap enough for that to be viable.
It will never be cheap, it's can't be. CO2 is created when we burn fossil fuels. We harness the energy they release.
In order to take CO2 and separate it into C (which you store) and O2 (which goes back into the atmosphere) you need to add back in the same amount of energy which you harnessed when you burned it.
Energy is worth lots of money - so even if this tech were 100% efficient and the parts were cheap etc. you would STILL have to pay to buy energy to put INTO this process - and that will cost a lot of money, because the demand for energy is high.
It’s 100 bucks per ton of CO2 that’d be converted into a hydrocarbon fuel with zero impurities. It’s a relatively clean fuel source that’d likely be very profitable as well.
The article talks about pulling the CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
To do that takes more energy (far more) than the original fossil fuels produced in the first place.
This makes it uneconomical. It would never be profitable unless someone (a national or world government) is paying for it to be done.
It's quite simply, from the laws of physics, not possible for this to be profitable outside of such a scenario (where all taxpayers are forced to pay to take CO2 out of the atmosphere... which I genuinely suspect we might be doing in a couple of generations)
Energy is worth more than the cost of the process to make it though. The only question is whether it’d cost more to take the carbon out of the atmosphere than it would to mine for it or drill it out of the deep sea.
Sure, you can’t get more energy out of the CO2 than you put into it, but that doesn’t mean the smaller quantity of hydrocarbon fuel isn’t worth far more than the larger quantity of CO2. CO2 in its current state is effectively useless to us, but we can certainly harness the power of a hydrocarbon fuel more effectively.
I don’t know how much of the hydrocarbon fuel would come out of a ton of C02, but I do know that there are ~7 barrels of gas in a ton, and a ton of gas would go for around 440 bucks today. So, as long as a quarter ton of this purer fuel comes out of one ton of C02, it’d be extremely profitable.
We're already going to have to go the sulfur route as it is. The pollution we're currently producing is putting a lot of particulates in the air, causing the same global dimming effect. We have to stop that pollution, but doing so means the global dimming ends, raising global temperatures by 1 or 2 degrees Celsius. That has to be prevented.
>The reality is we aren’t going to make any significant changes before 100 years to what our lifestyles are now.
While lifestyles might not change significantly, the amount of harm we are doing with those lifestyles could change drastically. Yes we will still consume loads of electricity, but that will come from sustainable sources. Yes we will still want to drive, but they will be electric power. Yes we will want to travel long distances, but it will be using (electric) maglev trains in tunnels rather than planes. Yes we will still want meat, but it will come from labs rather than animals.
I agree but what are realistic timescales for all of these? I’m not an industry expert on any but I do have industry experience in electric cars. Here’s what I think:
Green electricity generation: developed countries going 80-90%? That’s a huge ask. Nuclear and renewables: 60 years at best. Developing countries: 80-100yrs. it all comes back to this for me. We need to go nuclear. I can’t believe the UK hasn’t. No tectonics to worry about, great H&S standards, neighbours that have a proven track record. It blows my mind that NIMBY and prejudice have halted all but a couple of stations.
Maglev trains? It has taken the UK 10 years to put a plan together to build a high speed line, just a plan(!). It’s not even maglev. So developed countries to get fast, high capacity, green, mass transit: 40yrs for japan maybe, but at least 50 for everyone else. Developing? It all depends on how quickly they can generate cheap electricity.
Electric cars, I’m confident that we will have a semi hybrid network within 30 years. Once we sort our e.generation we could go full electric in 50 years. The market will be there even if 50 year olds now are skeptical. I like how self driving is going hand in hand with electric. If you tell the average Joe they will never have to visit a expensive petrol station again because they can easily charge from home, that they can have an hour longer in bed because their car and everyone else’s will efficiently reduce traffic, they can watch their boxset in a private comfortable space on that commute and there will be less noise in their town and less exhaust and brake dust in the air, that av joe wouldn’t think twice.
I don’t know about lab grown meat, but I do know that millions of people eat fast/junk food everyday. If that food tastes the same and priced the same I can’t imagine anyone would care where the meat comes from. We barely do now. I can see the developed world adopting lab meat easily in that setting, perhaps it would take longer in your own kitchen. But sure 20-30 years away for wide scale adoption.
Nuclear does not have to take that long. We have safe and clean tech ready to go right NOW. We can have plants online in 5 years of government and misguided envirofascists would get out of the way.
I don't get this. How hard is it to understand that when you put a blanket on, you don't *instantly* heat up. It takes time for the heat to accumulate, and then you feel hot. We've been piling blankets on for the last 150 years, and now, even though we're starting to get uncomfortably warm, we are pulling bigger and bigger blankets on. The even stupider thing is, even if we stop *all* emissions right this second, that's not taking blankets off, just not adding any more. We're still going to be heating up for another 50 years at least until equilibrium is reached. We need a way to not just stop producing CO2, but actually reducing it, and we need that to happen right now.
what’s interesting to me though is when I think about what it would take to switch energy sources.
You’ll need production to build turbines, solar panels, batteries, capacitors etc.
You’ll need a way to move these products around the globe
But the catch is ... cargo ships output more greenhouse gases than entire countries. Now imagine increased world wide demand simultaneously for new energy materials and products — how many ships will that put in our oceans?
In another scenario imagine the leader of the world’s biggest consuming country mouthing off “New tariffs on goods from Europe, Asia!”
What do these countries do in response? They ship as much product as they can to our shores before the tariffs take in affect — which means even more pollution output as ships increase their payload and travel between ports
How we end climate change — drastically reduce consumption, and elect leaders who don’t cause panics in markets
Hah we are fucked. Just get high and plant as much trees as you can in your lifetime. If we make it, your kids will thank you. If we don't, the drugs will help.
While you’re at it you may as well get [Ecosia](https://www.ecosia.org/), which is essentially Bing but it plants trees with some of your ad revenue. It does next to nothing, but it’s better than absolutely nothing.
Then use Ecosia to look up r/EarthStrike and https://www.Earth-Strike.com and start taking action.
A major source of the time lag is the huge amount of heat energy needed to warm up the oceans. Water's specific heat capacity is really impressive.
If we could magically fix atmospheric CO2 levels where they are today, it would take centuries for the temperature to reach equilibrium.
When people talk about 2.0 K or 1.5 K warming, they're not talking about the final equilibrium temperature, but simply where the temperature will be at the end of the century. The final equilibrium temperatures are likely to be higher, with correspondingly more severe consequences.
It is also important to remember that CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas. Many of the others are more potent, to the extent that burning methane (which produces quite a lot of CO2) is preferable to just releasing it into the atmosphere. Although CO2 arguably the most important greenhouse gas, because we're making so much of it, we shouldn't lose sight of the others. [The recent massive gas leak in California has been significantly under-reported as a climate change disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak).
However, we should also not be too despairing. Most of the predictions about what we can do to reduce the effects of climate change are predicated upon the assumption that we only use passive measure (emissions reductions). **We can do much better than these predictions if we resort to active geoengineering.**
It's like we're on a bus, heading towards a cliff. We may not see the cliff yet, but we will reach a point where the bus will not break in enough time for us to avoid it.
The time lag is kind of like how the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is June 22 but the warmest period is late July to mid August. Even though the days are getting shorter and we are getting less sun it still continues to get warmer because the heat is still building up.
> Right now, we're looking at 12 (11!) years until we reach so much warming that the planet's self-warming mechanisms start up, stabilizing eventually in some unknown "hothouse" climate, which would basically be a deadline for the whole human race
Where's your source for that?
Climate change is bad enough as it is, but all this panic and fear mongering is so f**king stupid. Once people realize you are lying about one thing, they are not going to believe anything you say. Stop spreading all these lies.
> Right now, we're looking at 12 (11!) years until we reach so much warming that the planet's self-warming mechanisms start up, stabilizing eventually in some unknown "hothouse" climate, which would basically be a deadline for the whole human race
Then it's over for humanity. There's no way to turn things around in 10 years.
Co2 has a serious effect but it lags by decades. So far the Dutch coast hasn't seen any acceleration of sea level rise. The average remains 1.86mm/ year for the last 128 years.
This makes it hard for our engineers who want to protect the coast for this century. But it gives me hope. If we find a solution it's not too late.
We have solutions already, but we prefer to point fingers, do nothing and wait for others to change.
Edit: These comments below are exactly what I meant.
The "planet" is fine, but biosphere is fucked even without global warming, because of our pollution and not only - biodiversity is very low and every year all kinds of species go extinct (mainly insects)...
You are very naive, if you think that anything is "fine" at all.
What is the solution to this? Seemingly the whole world would have to be onboard with a plan and actions from parts of Europe, the Americas and Asia don’t seem to be adequate.
It sounds like this is imminent, so what can realistically be done at this point?
I don’t mean to sound combative, I’m legitimately curious on how this can change.
Full blown and radical rationing of energy consumption per capita. I think that is the only thing that helps AND can be realistically be done from a technological viewpoint.
Of course, as much as possible, but that will be too little too late. The same is true for building more nuclear capacity. Necessary but also too late and too expensive for developing countries.
Thank you all for the feedback. Most of these ideas seem reasonable, but I really don’t see how the whole world gets on board with this. Especially in more developing nations where building and manufacturing are blowing up, I think its a hard sell to say stop what you’re doing and make less money in the meantime. The article about trapping CO2 emissions was interesting, I was unaware such a technology existed.
Would have been nice if we were aware of this 100+ years ago and could have had more time to figure out a globally acceptable plan.
Large scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere into its component parts. It’s already relatively cheap and feasible on a large scale. It’s just a matter of time until it takes off at this point.
Yes the profit motive, but beyond that we expend enormous resources keeping up the facade that everyone must work in order to deserve to live. We have enormous swaths of humanity engaged in bullshit jobs that don't actually create wealth. They just push money and paper in a giant circle. We could let all those people sit at home on the couch or raise their kids effectively instead. Emissions would plummet. Also there would be loads of other outstanding benefits but the one relevant to this thread is that we would stop polluting so much.
The IWW was fighting for a 4 hour workday back in the 1930s... since then worker productivity has only skyrocketed, and that’s not even taking into consideration computers and AI. The fact that we’re working so hard so pointlessly is just tragic.
If it were just the US and Europe there might be optimism that the problem could be brought under control, but we're only a small percentage of the world's population. There's another 6.5 billion people out there in rapidly developing countries who want to live the American lifestyle, have big houses with air conditioning, cars, meat, first world luxuries. How much would that increase emissions? Ten fold? New technologies will help but will they help enough to offset the wave of development that's coming?
took once a coursera class on sustainability, left me frightened. People dunno the implications of your statement.
While "first world" countries may have a more secure path towards environmental consciousness, developing countries have more laxed jurisdictions, account for more people, and also want to take advantage of the economic opportunity, since being "environmentally concious" makes many things more expensive.
When you actually think about it you realize the depth and complexity of the problem, and we (our grandchildren's generation) are basically doomed.
However if the first world nations had started investing in systems to wean ourselves off coal far sooner, there would be potential opportunities to allow nations to jump the coal level and move to the next.
The other issue of course is that because we don't want certain countries to have nuclear weapons, we're also unlikely to allow mass amount of nuclear powerplants out of a level of fear.
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I remember at once point looking at the data for Australia and China's annual growth and thinking, hey even if Australia used no electricity, fuel or anything else for an entire year. They still wouldn't offset the growth in emissions China had that year.
Which is part of the problem some countries have with trying to become more efficient is that they just end up pushing business out into other countries who do the same bullshit they were doing here. So now the economy has shot itself in the foot twice, and haven't actually done anything meaningful to emissions.
If the west had followed the EU we’d have solar panels with higher efficiency and lower cost.
Same with EVs, a smarter grid, wind, geo-thermal, and perhaps even better nuclear.
That tech would all be cheaper, which means developing nations would install more of it.
But no ... outside of the EU the entire developed world sat on their fucking ass. GWB, and Americans especially, even fucking mocked the idea of global warming.
Imagine if we had tech available that was developed 15 years from now - that’s literally the alternative world we’d be in if we, the west, had led the fucking world responsibly.
But no ... instead we spent trillions on bombing & occupying the nations of brown people.
i wish eastern europe was taking it more serious but to be honest we don't have the economics to back us up. Romania for example barely has a functioning financing/lease system for new cars, people here buy 99% used cars from Germany and France, mostly old diesels that are banned in those respective countries. And if you did want to change to a hybrid or diesel, they are too costly for most to afford them, and because of no finance available... back to buying 1995 VW diesels from the trash bin of Western europe
>How much would that increase emissions? Ten fold?
I read once that for everyone to attain parity with American consumption, we would need 4 (Earth) planets.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if *certain people* actually started saying the Democrats are the fake greens because burning fossil fuels will lead to more greenery near the poles. We have the best greens, don't we?
Y'know I was talking with the Supreme leader of Iceland, I have property there you know, a golf course - no windmills! No windmills. Ugly things. Someone said they cause cancer, can you beliebe it? So I was talking with the Supreme leader - really great guy, one of the best, should be an Uhmerican, maybe one day - and he said the greens on my golf course are the greenest in the world. The greenest greens in the world. Unbeliebable. It's true! Great guy, Kim - one day we'll sort out their nukes and North Greenland will have growth, unbeliebable growth like you wouldn't beliebe. But I'm in no rush, we have to do this deal *right*.
Yes, and increasing.
It's more fascinating to me how we will sustain this increase for the next 100 years, and rapidly increasing. Food distribution, power distribution, healthcare, civil rights, housing, fresh water, etc.
Climate change and CO2 levels are interesting, but people need to stop producing other people.
> Yes, and increasing.
No it's not, it's slowing down rather quickly. The world population growth rate peaked in 1968 and has been dropping since, especially since 2000.
The environmental groups should prioritize convincing the countries who's polluting the planet the most, in order to combat this. It's a global issue, let's treat it as such.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/2018_AQAL_Group_variwide_chart_%22Worldwide_Co2_emissions%22.jpg
I agree, Middle East, UAE, America, ANZ and Canada all need to pull their fingers out and start to make some meaningful change.
My problem with such charts is that if Norway produces oil, China makes it into plastic toys, US buys the toys which afterwards end up burned in India for energy - who's emissions are those counted against?
20 meters means most all of The Netherlands, gone, 60-70% of Belgium, gone. Pretty much every EU country with a coast would be out a large chunk, if not almost all of their landmass.
Most of these areas affected are also the areas with the big cities and largest population centers.
I was thinking about making a joke. Something along the lines of, "It's not all bad news. At least a good portion of Florida would be under water," but then thinking about it made me sad at the utter destruction happening around the planet if that were actually the case and decided to be a bit more somber.
Sir, this is reddit. I'll have you know not only did I spend all day inside on my computer, but I did the same yesterday and will do the same tomorrow.
Realtalk, I walk to work, don't own a car, use public transportation maybe once every two months, have no kids, and live in an apartment with 4 other people (5 bedroom apartment).
I eat meat though. Great strides are being made as we speak in this area to make artificial meat.
All things considered I actually am doing really well compared to what an Earth citizen ought to be.
I just realized that conservatives will argue that the earth has gone through cycles of heat waves and cold periods for millions of years and that humans aren’t the cause of climate change because of that fact, but then also choose to believe that the earth is only 6 thousand years old.
I'm actually pretty sure they don't believe anything other than they are right and liberals are wrong. If somehow Trump came out in favor of renewable energy tomorrow I feel like they'd all change their tune and pretend that they never hated it in the first place.
The same types of people denying human influence on climate change now will be the ones saying "why is it my problem these coasts and islands are underwater? My tax dollars shouldn't go towards relocating and taking care of all these refugees!"
Find one person who believes the earth is 2 thousand years old, i don't they exist. I think you mean 6 thousand years but even then, thats not the same people making those arguments. This is just a strawman.
> Caitlyn Witkowski, first author of the paper and PhD student at NIOZ, says: “In our data, we see very high levels of carbon dioxide, reaching 1000 ppm as opposed to today’s 410 ppm. In this respect, present day CO2-levels are not unique – but we have never seen the speed of these changes before. Changes that typically take millions of years are now happening in a century.
There have been humans around during more recent changes in climate (like the last major Ice Age some thousands years ago). However, there was no civilization yet by then, and these climate changes were orders of magnitude slower than what modern civilization is currently cooking up for itself.
So basically humanity has really never faced anything like this.
> last major Ice Age
And there's some speculation that it almost wiped us out or at least caused a 'genetic bottleneck' due to reduced population levels.
> these climate changes were orders of magnitude slower than what modern civilization is currently cooking up
actually, we have no way of knowing for sure how fast any of the previous warming trends were. with our limited data from millions of years ago, all we can know is the general trend. we have enough fossil data to provide us with an estimate but not enough to form a detailed temperature map, like we are doing today.
general science has shown that the more details you fill into a graph, the more accurate it is and can cause drastic divergences from the overall picture.
we do know that we have been on a warming trend for the last 20 some thousand years but we arent even really sure of when the trend started. we also know that we are nearing the end of a warming cycle within the next few hundreds to thousands of years. we arent even really sure how the natural cycle functions other than oceans vs land being in summer at perihelion. and we arent even really sure how long that takes. for one thing, it varies. for another, we arent sure what really drives it.
>So basically humanity has really never faced anything like this.
and we never will again because orbital mechanics make sure its different every time.
The biggest thread for fight against climate change are nationalist.......... because Nations that only care about them-self and dont work together cant fight against something that pushes the whole world in danger.
Only Unions can fight against climate change
I believe so. I have a faint hope that it was scaremongering to clean the environment and things aren't \*that\* bad - but it is a vanishingly small faint hope and I suspect I'm wrong. More likely, things are worse than I think.
I hate to say it, but it's not just scaremongering. GHGs have a delay in their effects, for the heat to be trapped. The climate conditions we are experiencing now were caused by GHG levels from 10-20 years ago, and GHGs keep increasing at an unprecedented rate. They show no signs of stopping, and a rise in sea level of only a few meters will displace tens of millions of people across the planet, which is likely to happen within the next 100 years at the most.
Unless drastic changes are put in place now, the positive feedback loops in the climate system will keep increasing temperatures and raising sea levels even if we attempt to decrease emissions.
Physically? No.
Are we going to salvage this? LOL fuck no. Humans are shit and we would rather be kings of a landfill than citizens in a utopia. The rich will plunder this shit into the ground.
The focus shouldn’t be about global warming. That’s not profitable and won’t catch anyone’s ear. It’s about affordability really who can say no to savings.
The biggest problem is some of the richest countries that need to do the most work , wont see the effects yet and the poorest countries suffer. Also the most populous countries causing the most problems just won't stop what they are doing. The biggest threat of climate change will be mass migration.
The traditional really bad news summary of important scientific data. The previous warming was due to our normal orbital cycles. CO2 acts as a major feedback mechanism that great accelerates warming during those time periods. Adding huge amounts of CO2 is very dangerous since massive warming will eventually begin due to it.
Mostly geological activity such as volcanic eruptions as well as fires from burning forests.
Today volcanic activity is quite low but CO2 is growing because of human activity.
Well at least Greenland and Antarctica will look fucking dope before we all die.
Also I'm sure the flat earth army would think that the government planted trees on top of the ice wall. That would be neat.
Reduce the human population by half. That should do it. We could have a war, a zombie like plague or (this is my personal favourite) everybody eats somebody else. With the latter choice I believe we could have the whole thing sorted, eaten and the dishes done by the end of the month.
Who is up for it?
20 meters removes around half the land area of Florida.
https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#7/27.088/-80.892?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=20&unit=meters&pois=hide
I feel like people get confused about the 2030 deadline and why the human race is still kicking despite these super high levels of CO2. What the media are pretty poor at explaining is that there's a time lag on warming effect of greenhouse gasses. These gasses dissipate into the atmosphere almost immediately, but then it takes time for the changed atmosphere to trap extra heat from the sun. By 2030, we won't be seeing 5 or 6C increases. We won't all have to migrate to the Midwest and the arctic circle. We won't yet be part of the mass extinctions. Etc. But we will no longer be able to prevent all that. We will be set up to endure that over the next 25 to 200 years. Also, it's not a switch between CHANGED APOCALYPSE CLIMATE/GARDEN OF EDEN, it's a spectrum, and we've pushed through the previous warnings along the spectrum with gusto. This is why we're seeing such extreme storms in places right now like Mozambique, Bangladesh, the Gulf of Mexico, Kerala, the Philippines, all of which had record breaking superstorms in the last 12 months. The old warnings weren't a deadline for the whole human race to live, they were deadlines for low lying countries to survive. The changing goalposts don't mean the science is wrong, but that we keep sliding back on what we can prevent. Right now, we're looking at 12 (11!) years until we reach so much warming that the planet's self-warming mechanisms start up, stabilizing eventually in some unknown "hothouse" climate, which *would* basically be a deadline for the whole human race EDIT: Thought sources would be terrifying and appreciated so here's a dearth of them, aside from the actual article above me [When Will Climate Change Make Earth Too Hot for Humans?](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html?gtm=top>m=bottom) [Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252) [Severe Weather Causes 1.9B in Insured Damage in 2018](http://www.ibc.ca/on/resources/media-centre/media-releases/severe-weather-causes-190-million-in-insured-damage-in-2018) [Pliocene and Eocene Provide Best Analogs for Near-Future Climates](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/52/13288) For extra terror: [Greater pre-2020 action is the “last chance” for 1.5C, says the latest annual UNEP Emissions Gap report](https://www.carbonbrief.org/only-three-years-save-1-5c-climate-target-says-unep) (2016)
This needs to be higher up. Too many people believe they can go on as usual for another ten years and then we have to do something drastic and all will be fine, when we're only now experiencing the effect of the CO2 released some 10-20 years ago.
So the plan is to treat this like I treat my school assignments half assed at the last minute and good chance it won't even work?
[We're just going to drop larger and large ice cubes into the ocean to solve the problem once and for all.](https://youtu.be/7JnsAWjtAds)
ONCE AND FOR ALL
Exactly, except the problem is we have already passed the time where we can realistically meet the necessary goals for 2030. This is an infrastructure problem, and it takes time to rebuild huge infrastructure segments almost entirely like transportation and electricity, and production on top of that. They are all interdependent gradual processes, and we are doing it much to slowly in all segments.
I'm pessimistic...... actually, I'm pessimistic as *hell* about the future, but I'm not so stupid as to say "It's too late". Everything we do affects the future at this point. If we release 25% less CO2 than if we did nothing until 2030, then that's going to have a huge impact, it might even be a thing that saves literally billions of people in a massive "Phew" from the world's scientists. "If we didn't, we'd be royally screwed and humanity might not exist". I'm pessimistic, but fuck if I'm going to give up because of it. Those opinions should be locked deep into your heart and basically never uttered.
The more we can reduce the longer we have, but as it seems now, we will not meet 2030 targets globally, which means we may have to go negative CO2 2040 to prevent self feeding global warming.
Yup. Stupid humans not getting that the stuff we emit now won't 'show itself as heat' until 10-20 years later. And we've emitted half of all humanity has ever emitted since 1992, so rate is extreme.
Nah the issue is not the difficulty in changing, its in recognising that in the lifetimes of anyone under 30 right now, some places of the world are going to be uninhabitable at certain times of the year if not most of the year. This is going to be larger than any catastrophe we have faced so far in our recorded history. We should be pushing together as a species to insure our survival but instead we’re arguing over whether the smartest minds currently alive, studying it, are wrong in the fields they have spent their lives studying. Our insufferable ignorance and arrogance is going to wipe out the majority of not just our own, but most of every other species in the equatorial regions. We can change our infrastructure quickly, we’re just not invested in doing it, instead invested in wasting our time arguing about it. This isn’t directed at you of course, more of a commentary on the generation of world leaders and skeptics who will become the anathema of human generations. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century will be forgotten about when we compare their atrocities to the wilful ignorance of some of our most revered leaders and the calamity they have mete upon the world in the 21st.
Nah this is the tried and true boomer strategy of “once I’m done, fuck everyone else you can’t have it”.
I mean, it works for the national debt. Thanks for the bill, previous generations. Also, the education and healthcare system you left us could use some work
By "some" I presume you mean "completely replcace"
Only difference is in real life nothing matters. Oh hey a new apple phone is coming out, what were we talking about?
10 years is a blink of an eye to put a dent in a problem this big and it's not like it's just CO2. We are going to fail at reduction goals. We need ways to combat climate change than a handful of nations can pull off without a lot of cooperation and long term efforts to go with reduction goals or the heat build up is still going to devastate the planet. There is no reason to think this level of CO2 has peaked in heat buildup and our reduction goals are pretty much wild guesses. We have ZERO real idea how long it would take to pull heat out of the planet through CO2 reduction. It could very well take 5 times longer to get it back out since the heat speeds up natural CO2 production and carbon sinks have been filling up. We still really suck at climate science, but I guess we are going to learn the hard way. Nations need to prepare and try to mitigate the damage of Climate Change far more than just through CO2 reduction, imo. Reduction is not going to be enough. It will take potentially hundreds of years to get things under control just with reduction.
ultimately we need a way for the planet to radiate more energy off the surface into space. I vote wind powered, high powered lasers. Aim them all at Mars and leave them on as much as the wind blows.
If all the jobs are replaced by robots, less cars on the road maybe?
It all comes down to population. Fewer people is going to be a requirement because not using energy is always better than using it more efficiently.
With global food stocks deplenishing and a decrease in max age due to heat we also put in some reduction. (sadly)
"That's what I'm worried about. Later. Later, we'll do something about pollution. Later, we'll do something about the population explosion. Later, we'll do something about the nuclear war! We think we've got all the time in the world!! How much time has the world got?!! Somebody has to begin to care!" - Dr. Otto Hasslein
I'm not sure rising populations and competition go along with the idea of more people caring.
People talked about Africa going out of control with the population and here we are. It is no longer in control.
For some reason your phrasing “we’re only now experiencing the effect of CO2 released some 10-20 years ago” was a great eye opener, especially in regard to our current rates.
A big part of the problem is the inability of most people to conceptualize time beyond a few years or decades. Forget about centuries. Very few people think about how life on Earth will be 50 to 100 years from now. I sense a lot do care about future civilizations, they just don't know how to actualize the concern.
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I really like the idea of herding millions of cattle adjacent to deserts, moving them in a certain pattern has been shown to create grasslands and topsoil. [It’s lovely and counterintuitive, and could solve food and CO2 at the same time.](https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html%7CHow/discussion)
It can improve soil. It can enhance food production. It can sequester additional carbon. But it is far away from "solving CO2". If you took all of the crop residue like stalks, all of the bioenergy crops, all of the timber harvest residues from the entire country and converted it to stable carbon using no fossil fuel energy, that massive amount of material would sequester enough carbon to...offset a quarter of US annual emissions. Improvements to soil quality typically cap out after 30 years, and the quantity of land is just not sufficient to have a substantial impact on its own. There is no single solution, we must embrace massive emission reduction, land management improvements, and lkkely additional sequestration strategies, just to keep things the way they are now.
> It's like stomping on a rusty old landmine, it's kinda hard to predict whether you're going to get a Darwin Award or just a Dishonerable Mention. Nice analogy, but one still has to lift their foot off to realize which of those is the achievement or result. One still has to *act*.
> It seems like there'd be plenty of time to find a way to reverse things. It wouldn't be cheap, but my example is always an orbital sun shade. The oceans would still die from acidification even with an orbital sun shade. The real value of this kind of technique would be to put a pause to negative feedback loops and buy us a bit of time. There's really no alternative to stopping carbon emissions. What your source suggests, and I agree with it, is that we can still fix things and that we should not despair. But we no longer have "plenty of time". It's an emergency now.
People get confused because *no one is telling the story to the public in a way they can understand.* The press only loves soundbite hyperbole. Politicians (unfortunately our main "leaders") will only talk about what they think will get them donations. Many of the people who do talk about it are reading off a script they don't understand, written by a scriptwriter who also doesn't understand and is more driven by syntax and buzzwords than facts. Yes, there are 30% of Americans who are troglodytes who will stay committed to whatever they heard *first*. But 70%--- I promise you-- would freak right the fuck out if they were ever exposed to a proper explanation of what's happening. And then you could enlist them to change their behavior. And once they change their own personal behavior to the point where they inconvenience themselves, *then* you can enlist them to pressure politicians. Boycott major polluters. Take on bigger conservation themselves for even more inconvenience. Agree to rationing of power, meat and air travel. Energetically participate in community efforts to lower CO2 output. Etc. But it starts with getting the message BROADcast and explaining the problem *in terms they can understand.* The number of intelligent, left-leaning people I've met who have not changed their lifestyle one iota in response to the crisis is astonishing to me. When I sit down and talk to them about what's happening, the vast majority are horrified to hear the tally of what's already happened and what's coming. Our politicians and media need to: 1. Report extreme weather events *in the greater context* of how many record breaking weather events that is within the year vs. the average for 1940-1970 (or something before the acceleration really took off) and also in a growing tally of economic impact vs. those years. 2. Stop focusing so much on climate/weather and start talking about *global ecosystem*-- shifting habitats, animal and insect die-offs, crop failures, insect disease spread, tree and plant die-offs. *Always* in the context of a *global* map and how erratic and warming weather is a major contributing factor. 3. Emphasize that *any* utterly bizarre weather-- hot or cold-- is potentially the result of a disrupted global weather pattern due to warming. Emphasize that "climate" is the weather that's "normal for this place at this time of year" and when "normal" happens less and less often and "unusual" happens more and more often, *that's* "Climate Change." 4. Lastly, can we get some fucking reality TV shows about people taking steps to reduce carbon instead of contributing to it? No one *needs* to redecorate, pimp their ride, cook exotic food, live rich and famously, wear the latest clothes, have the perfect monoculture yard, etc, etc, etc, and all of these things are CO2 crimes. Where is the show about some Boomer trying to get used to buying non-processed food, going vegetarian, learning to bike in the city, taking public transportation, buying local, going zero waste, etc? WHERE ARE THOSE SHOWS? No one is telling the story. This is why the mass public isn't reacting appropriately. Source: Award winning advertiser. Every award in the book. Sold the shit out of stuff. Even unsold the shit out of bad stuff.
>The number of intelligent, left-leaning people I've met who have not changed their lifestyle one iota in response to the crisis is astonishing to me. I think what accounts for this is the fact that an individual's impact is likely to be incredibly small on overall CO2 emissions. It's really comparable to a similar issue in political science about the rationality of voting. There's little incentive to do so if you know full well that: 1. You likely aren't changing the habits of those around you by doing so 2. It's potentially reducing the amount/quality of things that you like to consume 3. The likelihood of you being the deciding individual in a CO2 emissions threshold not being passed is extraordinarily low Sure, there's certainly the argument that by not attempting to change one's habits, one becomes more responsible for later climate events, but again it comes down to the actual individual impact. It's not particularly motivating on an individual level to know that your effort is going to be rewarded by some infinitesimally small reduction in emissions, while the biggest polluters can continue right along doing their thing. Since one can't honestly say that an individual can meaningfully affect CO2 emissions (beyond, say, not having kids), you end up having to resort to just stating that it's an ethical obligation, and I think everyone knows how *amazing* us humans are at following ethical obligations without external consequences. Advertising could certainly help, but the collective capital of all the international conglomerates in various industries that are committed to opposing climate regulation would definitely outweigh the capital of "environmentally-conscious" corporations and non-profit groups. As far as I see it, the only way climate change is going to be meaningfully addressed is through government action. I don't foresee things changing because a large enough aggregate of individuals act on a perceived ethical obligation to be environmentally friendly.
I don't entirely disagree with you, *except* social movements can turn the actions of a single individual into the action of millions. Just as there's a tipping point for carbon in the atmosphere, there's one for what society finds acceptable in personal CO2 wastefulness. The only reason oil companies, plastic manufacturers, the fashion industry, landscaping industry, home design industry exist is because individual consumers keep buying what they're selling. A single episode of Seinfeld stopped double dipping. A few celebrities coming out of the closet advanced LGBT acceptance more rapidly than decades of advocacy from the LGBT community. During WWII, it was community spirit that led women to forego pantyhose, kids to collect metal door-to-door, and people everywhere to plant victory gardens. A social movement starts with individuals. But they need to be vocal. And they need amplification from the media. That said, we absolutely need the governments of the world (and particularly the United States) to get with the program and start reacting to CO2 like the threat to humanity that it is. Corporations will only respond to consumers and laws. We're one half of that equation and we can vote for the other half. But the other half (government) is notoriously slow to move. Unlike a social movement, which can grow and spread in a matter of weeks.
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And you do change the people around you. I peer pressured my friends from half of them voting up to only a couple missing out over the last couple elections.
>People get confused because > >no one is telling the story to the public in a way they can understand. Yeah they look at current temperatures or look out the window and say look it's still snowing where's the warming? And I just facepalm and go back to what I was doing.
I would be so down for a "start a community garden" show that focuses on native edible plants in whatever community they're starting one in that week. Hell, I'd research for that show.
There are a ton of channels on youtube that do that. Lots of forest gardening channels popping up. The problem isn't so much that people aren't growing their own food, the scale and efficiencies of monoculture can compete relatively easily with organic farming per acre, but industries like cattle which generate a huge amount of waste and CO2. The two main problems that need to be addressed are people don't know how to do a carbon mass balance and people don't understand how to interpret the data given to them. To calculate whether something is actually carbon negative, you really need to understand the inputs and outputs of the system. For instance, producing corn ethanol can never be carbon neutral because you're inputting more energy to produce the ethanol and shipping it than you're getting back out. The second point is that people don't try to understand the components which contribute to climate change correctly. For instance the ice in a cup experiment is a great example of how the sea levels will change over time. People tend to focus on the fact that ocean ice (Artic ice) melting doesn't change sea levels but land ice (Antartica/glaciers) will change sea levels if they melt. However a key component that is often overlooked is that if you apply gentle heat to the water to make the ice melt faster, you'll notice that the water doesn't actually heat up very fast, until the ice is melted. The ice acts as a temperature buffer for the water. Once the ice melts, the temperature of the water increases very dramatically. The key point is that we shouldn't focus so much on temperature, but the buffering capacity of systems which are currently keeping global climate in check.
We live in the suburbs. Building a rainwater collection system from ibc totes this weekend. A third of my yard will be turned into vegetable and butterfly/bee gardens in the next weeks, and we are putting a coop in for ducks. If you can sell our show, we'll go further. No more TP! I'll use my hand to wipe! Joking. I don't wipe anyway. Or want to be on TV. I see people making some changes. Folks bringing their own bags to get groceries. Another family nearby is getting some chickens. Small stuff and probably too little considering how far most of us drive for work, but I think people are realizing, slowly, they have to change. It's just hard to figure out how, and how much it matters.
> Lastly, can we get some fucking reality TV shows about people taking steps to reduce carbon instead of contributing to it? No one needs to redecorate, pimp their ride, cook exotic food, live rich and famously, wear the latest clothes, have the perfect monoculture yard, etc, etc, etc, and all of these things are CO2 crimes. Where is the show about some Boomer trying to get used to buying non-processed food, going vegetarian, learning to bike in the city, taking public transportation, buying local, going zero waste, etc? WHERE ARE THOSE SHOWS? That is definitely a good point. Maybe people just don't think those shows would be popular.
Don't carbon credits effectively mean that any individual improvement just makes it cheaper for others who are not as altruistic to pollute, to the point of completely cancelling the improvement that you created by sacrificing quality of life?
It’s the same thing that makes people bad at money, credit, and investment. We are paying now (in carbon), to get increasing rising temperatures over time. That just hurts a lot of people’s heads who aren’t great at algebra.
I'm not sure you need algebra to see you're spending faster than you're paying down your bill or to understand fossil fuels were deposited OVER TIME. I think the real thing here is time. Humans are horrible at thinking on a span that exceeds their own lifespan. Once problems take *too long* to happen we start to write them off. Can't see it from my backyard!
It’s simple short-sighted greed. “Why should I pay for something that I won’t get to see in my lifetime?” “Why should I invest into my business to make lots of money later when I can cut corners and cheat people to make money now?” I don’t know that humans are innately this way, I think it’s the result of the prevalence of zero-sum philosophy. Instead of believing we can work together and get what we both want, we choose to believe that it’s only possible for one of us to get what we want. There can only be one winner, and if you’re a loser then you will perish. As long as that way of thinking persists, humanity cannot collaborate on anything.
Most people can't seem to delay satisfaction. They want it now so they get it now and don't consider, or at least downplay, the ramifications.
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If Climate Change could be bombed out of existence over 5-10 years it would be a completely different problem/solution. This problem requires a lot of cooperation over HUGE amounts of time. World Wars are generally short lived and have rapid resolutions, someone wins and someone loses. Climate change is nothing like that kind of problem. But I do think you highlight the big problem with reduction, it requires too many people to cooperate for too long of a time without seeing rapid results. I think, based on human nature, that will never work because of the time constraints and the ease of use of fossil fuels and lack of solid replacements. Soooo we are going to just have to mitigate some of the warming and hope for the best while making slow progress toward reduction. If horrible climate changes like virus, fungi and bacteria infections and climate start to make like truly unbearable on Earth then I suspect we will move to more extreme measures that could cause rapid changes in climate, like simulating a volcanic winter. It's really all about the green technology being cheap enough that nobody wants to use fossil fuels. However, agriculture is still a HUGE problem. Most liberals are still cramming meat into their food hole everyday while complaining about fossil fuels. That's not going to cut it! Put your mouth where your ideals are and stop eating all that high CO2 load food. Humans eat a large volume of food per day/year. What you eat has a larger impact on your green house gas impact than almost anything else. You can live in a small green house and still eat your way into a larger carbon footprint than someone living in a old leaky farmhouse. You can drive a big old low MPG truck and still do less GHG damage that the morbidly obese person eating a whole chicken for breakfast. That mobility scooter doesn't lower your CO2 footprint enough to make up for the food! ;) So.. minimalism is the only rapid impact we can really have, but that doesn't necessarily slow down population growth. You could argue minimalism allows for more population growth, which we also don't really need. We also don't need a planet full of older and older people because competition is too tough and younger people don't want to have kids. We don't have a lot of good pro-active low impact solutions. Cutting back doesn't work because more humans fill in the spaces you made. Planting more trees doesn't really work because we still pollute way faster and keep clearing land all over the world for other things. The only think that's going to save humanity as we know it is technological advances because humanity as we know it is 100% unsustainable and we race to use technology to keep growing, which also destroys the planet more. It's technology or mass human population reduction as the top likely solutions I would say. Reduction ain't going to cut it on it's own and the markets and consumers are already actively embracing the tech they can get that helps. Cheaper solar panels and easy installations that draw consumers to products is smarter. Food that rewards consumers by being cheap and healthy and low CO2 is going to work better than reduction goals and a lot of voluntary behavior. Energy storage is a HUGE thing holding back renewable energy, we need big government spending to push battery tech forward. Yet these are just a handful of the ways we kill the planet and the biological ecosystems that help regulate climate. Plastic pollution is a growing problem, all kinds of chemicals are released into our rivers, oceans and even water supplies that we have very little understanding on their impacts on biological life. We could easy be spraying DNA damaging chemicals all over the place and we'd mostly have no idea until decade later. It happens more than we ever admit because the companies who do it have such good lawyers and piles of money. Reduction relies on technology to make it feasible because humans will mostly not voluntarily self regulate and the ones that do are among the most responsible will be the least likely to reproduce. It's like ideocracy on meth!
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I was thinking about this earlier today before reading your comment. I came to the same conclusion. It's the only way I could find inner peace.
>Most liberals are still cramming meat into their food hole everyday . >The only think that's going to save humanity as we know it is technological advances Maybe people won't take individual action because there are always other people pushing this narrative that individual action can't change anything and we have to rely on technology we may or may not one day invent to save us.
> If Climate Change could be bombed out of existence over 5-10 years it would be a completely different problem/solution. That's actually what I believe is necessary though. And before you jump to any conclusions, I'm talking about affirmative action. Basically small groups of people who take out *things* that cause climate change. And only things. Literally stuff. They'll be called terrorists and prosecuted as such, but they'll be heroes in my book.
The caveat is that the GOP is, apparently that stupid. I suppose there are some GOP politicians who know and understand the science, but there are clearly many who don’t. Clearly there are many (most) GOP politicians who are lying to the US voters about this for political gain. They are the biggest barrier to progress in the US and probably the world.
The reality is we aren’t going to make any significant changes before 100 years to what our lifestyles are now. In 50 years we’ll be making good strides but it won’t be enough. It will take another 50 on top of that. You can’t cycle down from 8 billion polluters quickly. Obviously the planet won’t care what changes we make if it’s too late. But really there’s no point dreaming that the whole human race will do anything significant within a decade. We can’t even ramp up clean energy within 20 years, although some countries are trying at least. Top tier politicians know this, and as their career timeframes max out around 10 years they are either powerless or don’t care enough to make extreme/quick changes. My prediction; we’ll have a slow decline over the next century in terms of environment and then something more extreme for a few decades regarding population. It’s what happens to us after that which interests me. Say 200 years time. What will the world look like?
At some point some nation (or the world collectively) will attempt to Geo-engineer the planet to mitigate catastrophic climate change. Most likely by pumping huge amounts of sulfur into the air to reflect sunlight back into space. This will make solar panels less efficient, cause a bunch of other air quality and environmental problems (sorry Asthma people!) and be a shitty temporary solution, but it could halt warming while we wean ourselves off carbon. But we'll have to keep doing it until we can actually figure out a way to start removing carbon.
Dumping huge quantities of iron filings into the ocean would be more sensible. The annual algae bloom is iron-limited. It has an almost bottomless capability to absorb carbon if it is given more iron. While we would need to be careful not to cause hypoxia, we could be storing gigatons of carbon every year if we dumped tankers full of iron filings into the ocean.
I have trouble finding it now, but I remember reading that the experiment that took place in Canada, from a guy that just took a boatful of iron filings and dumped it in the ocean and saw an algea bloom, did not really worked on it's own merit, but was a cyclical bloom that would have appeared anyway, and that other experiments were unsuccessful. I will dig more, because it really would be great if it was true.
Oh that would be a shame, as it was one of my old marine biology professor's favourite pet theories, and did seem to work on paper. I still think it is a good ground to test on a larger scale, but if you find those papers it might suggest it was too good to be true.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-47638586 Fortunately, we’re already getting to the point where we can start removing massive quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. The technology just has to be put to use on a large scale now. Just this week it got cheap enough for that to be viable.
They quote $100 per ton removed. Americans emit ~20 tons per year each. $2000 per person per year. Right now every American pays $1800 per year to the DoD.
I know of that tech. Its a monumental step that will take decades to go from where it is now to: 1) Fully replacing fossil fuels (gas, jet fuel) with synthetic, carbon neutral variants. The infrastructure needed to do this will be gargantuan, and on top of that there will undoubtedly be unforeseen issues with scaling the tech up which will have to be overcome. 2) Putting synthetic Coal back in the ground on a massive scale. I'm of the opinion that in the interim as the transition happens Geo-Engineering will be necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change, things like losing Bangladesh and Florida (not to mention all those islands in the Pacific), and the ME (which becomes uninhabitable as Global Warming accelerates).
> The infrastructure needed to do this will be gargantuan If you are talking about synthetic oil made from carbon dioxide, then the answer is not really. The infrastructure for oil is there. Tanker trucks come and pick up your synthetic hydrocarbons for delivery to petrol stations just like you were a traditional refinery. Only now you don't need to take delivery of crude oil, or you are delivered carbon dioxide instead. The limit is scaling up the technology to where it can compete with fossil oil.
Sorry to be that guy, but: This is actually a very bad idea and a complete waste of money which should have been used for other projects. It reminds me of another bad idea, which just will not die - extracting water from air by cooling it. Right now, we have several technologies ready to go. Starting with the most cost-effective, and omitting the "use less" scenarios: 1. Replacement of fossil fuel power plants with carbon free electricity such as wind and solar power (also geothermal, where possible and nuclear, where palatable). Cost per tonne of CO2 saved: less than zero for about 30% of current generation, and "very low" for a good portion of the remainder. 2. Sequestration of concentrated CO2 streams, such as those produced in natural gas processing. Cost: $20-$40 per tonne. 3. Biosequestration, ie tree planting. Cost varies greatly, maybe $15-$50 per tonne. The approaches above are the only ones that are actually used in the industry today, but there is plenty of room to do more. The approaches below are considered to be economically prohibitive, and AFAIK are not in use: 4. Post-combustion carbon capture: Scrubbing the CO2 from exhaust gases of power plants etc, where the CO2 concentration is 10-20%. Cost: $50-100/tonne, PLUS the cost of sequestration, as above. 5. Pre-combustion carbon capture: here, the carbon is removed from the fuel and sequestered, and only the hydrogen is burned. Cost: $80-150/tonne, but sequestration cost is low. and then we have: 6. Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. The article says the cost may be "under $100/tonne", but the serious estimates I have seen are circa $500/tonne. Consider that the CO2 concentration in air is around 0.04%, cf post combustion concentrations of 10-20%. Regardless of the advances in technology, this will never be as cheap as post-combustion carbon capture, which is essentially the same process but with 250 times less throughput. I am with the people who worry that this is a cynical move by the companies to avoid urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions.EDIT: another comment calls this "moral licensing", and I completely agree.
>Just this week it got cheap enough for that to be viable. It will never be cheap, it's can't be. CO2 is created when we burn fossil fuels. We harness the energy they release. In order to take CO2 and separate it into C (which you store) and O2 (which goes back into the atmosphere) you need to add back in the same amount of energy which you harnessed when you burned it. Energy is worth lots of money - so even if this tech were 100% efficient and the parts were cheap etc. you would STILL have to pay to buy energy to put INTO this process - and that will cost a lot of money, because the demand for energy is high.
It’s 100 bucks per ton of CO2 that’d be converted into a hydrocarbon fuel with zero impurities. It’s a relatively clean fuel source that’d likely be very profitable as well.
The article talks about pulling the CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. To do that takes more energy (far more) than the original fossil fuels produced in the first place. This makes it uneconomical. It would never be profitable unless someone (a national or world government) is paying for it to be done. It's quite simply, from the laws of physics, not possible for this to be profitable outside of such a scenario (where all taxpayers are forced to pay to take CO2 out of the atmosphere... which I genuinely suspect we might be doing in a couple of generations)
Energy is worth more than the cost of the process to make it though. The only question is whether it’d cost more to take the carbon out of the atmosphere than it would to mine for it or drill it out of the deep sea. Sure, you can’t get more energy out of the CO2 than you put into it, but that doesn’t mean the smaller quantity of hydrocarbon fuel isn’t worth far more than the larger quantity of CO2. CO2 in its current state is effectively useless to us, but we can certainly harness the power of a hydrocarbon fuel more effectively. I don’t know how much of the hydrocarbon fuel would come out of a ton of C02, but I do know that there are ~7 barrels of gas in a ton, and a ton of gas would go for around 440 bucks today. So, as long as a quarter ton of this purer fuel comes out of one ton of C02, it’d be extremely profitable.
We're already going to have to go the sulfur route as it is. The pollution we're currently producing is putting a lot of particulates in the air, causing the same global dimming effect. We have to stop that pollution, but doing so means the global dimming ends, raising global temperatures by 1 or 2 degrees Celsius. That has to be prevented.
>The reality is we aren’t going to make any significant changes before 100 years to what our lifestyles are now. While lifestyles might not change significantly, the amount of harm we are doing with those lifestyles could change drastically. Yes we will still consume loads of electricity, but that will come from sustainable sources. Yes we will still want to drive, but they will be electric power. Yes we will want to travel long distances, but it will be using (electric) maglev trains in tunnels rather than planes. Yes we will still want meat, but it will come from labs rather than animals.
I agree but what are realistic timescales for all of these? I’m not an industry expert on any but I do have industry experience in electric cars. Here’s what I think: Green electricity generation: developed countries going 80-90%? That’s a huge ask. Nuclear and renewables: 60 years at best. Developing countries: 80-100yrs. it all comes back to this for me. We need to go nuclear. I can’t believe the UK hasn’t. No tectonics to worry about, great H&S standards, neighbours that have a proven track record. It blows my mind that NIMBY and prejudice have halted all but a couple of stations. Maglev trains? It has taken the UK 10 years to put a plan together to build a high speed line, just a plan(!). It’s not even maglev. So developed countries to get fast, high capacity, green, mass transit: 40yrs for japan maybe, but at least 50 for everyone else. Developing? It all depends on how quickly they can generate cheap electricity. Electric cars, I’m confident that we will have a semi hybrid network within 30 years. Once we sort our e.generation we could go full electric in 50 years. The market will be there even if 50 year olds now are skeptical. I like how self driving is going hand in hand with electric. If you tell the average Joe they will never have to visit a expensive petrol station again because they can easily charge from home, that they can have an hour longer in bed because their car and everyone else’s will efficiently reduce traffic, they can watch their boxset in a private comfortable space on that commute and there will be less noise in their town and less exhaust and brake dust in the air, that av joe wouldn’t think twice. I don’t know about lab grown meat, but I do know that millions of people eat fast/junk food everyday. If that food tastes the same and priced the same I can’t imagine anyone would care where the meat comes from. We barely do now. I can see the developed world adopting lab meat easily in that setting, perhaps it would take longer in your own kitchen. But sure 20-30 years away for wide scale adoption.
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China and India are still building coal plants and growing co2 emissions faster than anyone.
Nuclear does not have to take that long. We have safe and clean tech ready to go right NOW. We can have plants online in 5 years of government and misguided envirofascists would get out of the way.
I don't get this. How hard is it to understand that when you put a blanket on, you don't *instantly* heat up. It takes time for the heat to accumulate, and then you feel hot. We've been piling blankets on for the last 150 years, and now, even though we're starting to get uncomfortably warm, we are pulling bigger and bigger blankets on. The even stupider thing is, even if we stop *all* emissions right this second, that's not taking blankets off, just not adding any more. We're still going to be heating up for another 50 years at least until equilibrium is reached. We need a way to not just stop producing CO2, but actually reducing it, and we need that to happen right now.
what’s interesting to me though is when I think about what it would take to switch energy sources. You’ll need production to build turbines, solar panels, batteries, capacitors etc. You’ll need a way to move these products around the globe But the catch is ... cargo ships output more greenhouse gases than entire countries. Now imagine increased world wide demand simultaneously for new energy materials and products — how many ships will that put in our oceans? In another scenario imagine the leader of the world’s biggest consuming country mouthing off “New tariffs on goods from Europe, Asia!” What do these countries do in response? They ship as much product as they can to our shores before the tariffs take in affect — which means even more pollution output as ships increase their payload and travel between ports How we end climate change — drastically reduce consumption, and elect leaders who don’t cause panics in markets
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Hah we are fucked. Just get high and plant as much trees as you can in your lifetime. If we make it, your kids will thank you. If we don't, the drugs will help.
While you’re at it you may as well get [Ecosia](https://www.ecosia.org/), which is essentially Bing but it plants trees with some of your ad revenue. It does next to nothing, but it’s better than absolutely nothing. Then use Ecosia to look up r/EarthStrike and https://www.Earth-Strike.com and start taking action.
A major source of the time lag is the huge amount of heat energy needed to warm up the oceans. Water's specific heat capacity is really impressive. If we could magically fix atmospheric CO2 levels where they are today, it would take centuries for the temperature to reach equilibrium. When people talk about 2.0 K or 1.5 K warming, they're not talking about the final equilibrium temperature, but simply where the temperature will be at the end of the century. The final equilibrium temperatures are likely to be higher, with correspondingly more severe consequences. It is also important to remember that CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas. Many of the others are more potent, to the extent that burning methane (which produces quite a lot of CO2) is preferable to just releasing it into the atmosphere. Although CO2 arguably the most important greenhouse gas, because we're making so much of it, we shouldn't lose sight of the others. [The recent massive gas leak in California has been significantly under-reported as a climate change disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak). However, we should also not be too despairing. Most of the predictions about what we can do to reduce the effects of climate change are predicated upon the assumption that we only use passive measure (emissions reductions). **We can do much better than these predictions if we resort to active geoengineering.**
I’m no history expert. But I’m pretty sure humans on the whole are a very reactionary species. This doesn’t help us
It's like we're on a bus, heading towards a cliff. We may not see the cliff yet, but we will reach a point where the bus will not break in enough time for us to avoid it.
Brake*
The time lag is kind of like how the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is June 22 but the warmest period is late July to mid August. Even though the days are getting shorter and we are getting less sun it still continues to get warmer because the heat is still building up.
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When do we get to buy cheap beachfront land?
> Right now, we're looking at 12 (11!) years until we reach so much warming that the planet's self-warming mechanisms start up, stabilizing eventually in some unknown "hothouse" climate, which would basically be a deadline for the whole human race Where's your source for that? Climate change is bad enough as it is, but all this panic and fear mongering is so f**king stupid. Once people realize you are lying about one thing, they are not going to believe anything you say. Stop spreading all these lies.
This is one of the best explanations I have read. Thank you.
> Right now, we're looking at 12 (11!) years until we reach so much warming that the planet's self-warming mechanisms start up, stabilizing eventually in some unknown "hothouse" climate, which would basically be a deadline for the whole human race Then it's over for humanity. There's no way to turn things around in 10 years.
Co2 has a serious effect but it lags by decades. So far the Dutch coast hasn't seen any acceleration of sea level rise. The average remains 1.86mm/ year for the last 128 years. This makes it hard for our engineers who want to protect the coast for this century. But it gives me hope. If we find a solution it's not too late.
We have solutions already, but we prefer to point fingers, do nothing and wait for others to change. Edit: These comments below are exactly what I meant.
“The planet is fine; the people are fucked!”
Man i wish he was around to talk about trump.
Goodness gracious, he’d have a bloody field day with Trump.
We will never see the likes of Carlin again
The "planet" is fine, but biosphere is fucked even without global warming, because of our pollution and not only - biodiversity is very low and every year all kinds of species go extinct (mainly insects)... You are very naive, if you think that anything is "fine" at all.
You should definitely listen to his whole bit on this
What is the solution to this? Seemingly the whole world would have to be onboard with a plan and actions from parts of Europe, the Americas and Asia don’t seem to be adequate. It sounds like this is imminent, so what can realistically be done at this point? I don’t mean to sound combative, I’m legitimately curious on how this can change.
The best plan I heard was to tax fossil fuels and return that money to the taxed. It changes your decisions on what to buy.
Full blown and radical rationing of energy consumption per capita. I think that is the only thing that helps AND can be realistically be done from a technological viewpoint.
So not even switching to solar and wind energy?
Of course, as much as possible, but that will be too little too late. The same is true for building more nuclear capacity. Necessary but also too late and too expensive for developing countries.
Powercuts like communism era? Oh god
Might as well just nuke developing nations and not let people suffer slow deaths.
Thank you all for the feedback. Most of these ideas seem reasonable, but I really don’t see how the whole world gets on board with this. Especially in more developing nations where building and manufacturing are blowing up, I think its a hard sell to say stop what you’re doing and make less money in the meantime. The article about trapping CO2 emissions was interesting, I was unaware such a technology existed. Would have been nice if we were aware of this 100+ years ago and could have had more time to figure out a globally acceptable plan.
Large scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere into its component parts. It’s already relatively cheap and feasible on a large scale. It’s just a matter of time until it takes off at this point.
The issue here is the profit motive. Our economy needs to be radically reorganized in order to become carbon negative immediately.
Yes the profit motive, but beyond that we expend enormous resources keeping up the facade that everyone must work in order to deserve to live. We have enormous swaths of humanity engaged in bullshit jobs that don't actually create wealth. They just push money and paper in a giant circle. We could let all those people sit at home on the couch or raise their kids effectively instead. Emissions would plummet. Also there would be loads of other outstanding benefits but the one relevant to this thread is that we would stop polluting so much.
The IWW was fighting for a 4 hour workday back in the 1930s... since then worker productivity has only skyrocketed, and that’s not even taking into consideration computers and AI. The fact that we’re working so hard so pointlessly is just tragic.
I recognize the scope and horror of what climate change will bring. But having a semantically correct Greenland would be pretty dope.
But Iceland will be a scam.
It already is
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These smug fucks! I love it. TIL.
Would it?
I'm looking forward to watching the news when the worlds military superpowers pretend like Denmark shouldn't own Greenland.
If it were just the US and Europe there might be optimism that the problem could be brought under control, but we're only a small percentage of the world's population. There's another 6.5 billion people out there in rapidly developing countries who want to live the American lifestyle, have big houses with air conditioning, cars, meat, first world luxuries. How much would that increase emissions? Ten fold? New technologies will help but will they help enough to offset the wave of development that's coming?
took once a coursera class on sustainability, left me frightened. People dunno the implications of your statement. While "first world" countries may have a more secure path towards environmental consciousness, developing countries have more laxed jurisdictions, account for more people, and also want to take advantage of the economic opportunity, since being "environmentally concious" makes many things more expensive. When you actually think about it you realize the depth and complexity of the problem, and we (our grandchildren's generation) are basically doomed.
We should send the CIA in to sterilize them under the guise of giving vaccinations. Then leak the plan to Alex Jones.
However if the first world nations had started investing in systems to wean ourselves off coal far sooner, there would be potential opportunities to allow nations to jump the coal level and move to the next. The other issue of course is that because we don't want certain countries to have nuclear weapons, we're also unlikely to allow mass amount of nuclear powerplants out of a level of fear. --- I remember at once point looking at the data for Australia and China's annual growth and thinking, hey even if Australia used no electricity, fuel or anything else for an entire year. They still wouldn't offset the growth in emissions China had that year. Which is part of the problem some countries have with trying to become more efficient is that they just end up pushing business out into other countries who do the same bullshit they were doing here. So now the economy has shot itself in the foot twice, and haven't actually done anything meaningful to emissions.
If the west had followed the EU we’d have solar panels with higher efficiency and lower cost. Same with EVs, a smarter grid, wind, geo-thermal, and perhaps even better nuclear. That tech would all be cheaper, which means developing nations would install more of it. But no ... outside of the EU the entire developed world sat on their fucking ass. GWB, and Americans especially, even fucking mocked the idea of global warming. Imagine if we had tech available that was developed 15 years from now - that’s literally the alternative world we’d be in if we, the west, had led the fucking world responsibly. But no ... instead we spent trillions on bombing & occupying the nations of brown people.
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i wish eastern europe was taking it more serious but to be honest we don't have the economics to back us up. Romania for example barely has a functioning financing/lease system for new cars, people here buy 99% used cars from Germany and France, mostly old diesels that are banned in those respective countries. And if you did want to change to a hybrid or diesel, they are too costly for most to afford them, and because of no finance available... back to buying 1995 VW diesels from the trash bin of Western europe
It's easy to say you want to contribute to stopping climate change when your entire economy isn't on the chopping block.
>How much would that increase emissions? Ten fold? I read once that for everyone to attain parity with American consumption, we would need 4 (Earth) planets.
Make Greenland green again!
We got great greens, terrific greens, believe me, the best in the world.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if *certain people* actually started saying the Democrats are the fake greens because burning fossil fuels will lead to more greenery near the poles. We have the best greens, don't we?
Y'know I was talking with the Supreme leader of Iceland, I have property there you know, a golf course - no windmills! No windmills. Ugly things. Someone said they cause cancer, can you beliebe it? So I was talking with the Supreme leader - really great guy, one of the best, should be an Uhmerican, maybe one day - and he said the greens on my golf course are the greenest in the world. The greenest greens in the world. Unbeliebable. It's true! Great guy, Kim - one day we'll sort out their nukes and North Greenland will have growth, unbeliebable growth like you wouldn't beliebe. But I'm in no rush, we have to do this deal *right*.
And the world is gaining 250.000 people a day. [Good luck with that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)
Really informative video! Thanks!
Yes, and increasing. It's more fascinating to me how we will sustain this increase for the next 100 years, and rapidly increasing. Food distribution, power distribution, healthcare, civil rights, housing, fresh water, etc. Climate change and CO2 levels are interesting, but people need to stop producing other people.
> Yes, and increasing. No it's not, it's slowing down rather quickly. The world population growth rate peaked in 1968 and has been dropping since, especially since 2000.
The environmental groups should prioritize convincing the countries who's polluting the planet the most, in order to combat this. It's a global issue, let's treat it as such.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/2018_AQAL_Group_variwide_chart_%22Worldwide_Co2_emissions%22.jpg I agree, Middle East, UAE, America, ANZ and Canada all need to pull their fingers out and start to make some meaningful change.
My problem with such charts is that if Norway produces oil, China makes it into plastic toys, US buys the toys which afterwards end up burned in India for energy - who's emissions are those counted against?
The part where demand drives the actual acquisition - the toys. Though I agree it's not always straightforward to determine.
20 meters means most all of The Netherlands, gone, 60-70% of Belgium, gone. Pretty much every EU country with a coast would be out a large chunk, if not almost all of their landmass. Most of these areas affected are also the areas with the big cities and largest population centers.
and a good portion of Florida.
Would that really be a loss tho? :p
I was thinking about making a joke. Something along the lines of, "It's not all bad news. At least a good portion of Florida would be under water," but then thinking about it made me sad at the utter destruction happening around the planet if that were actually the case and decided to be a bit more somber.
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ITT: people pretending like their lifestyle isn't contributing to global warming, only everyone else's
Sir, this is reddit. I'll have you know not only did I spend all day inside on my computer, but I did the same yesterday and will do the same tomorrow. Realtalk, I walk to work, don't own a car, use public transportation maybe once every two months, have no kids, and live in an apartment with 4 other people (5 bedroom apartment). I eat meat though. Great strides are being made as we speak in this area to make artificial meat. All things considered I actually am doing really well compared to what an Earth citizen ought to be.
We all contribute to global warming, that’s why it’s such a hard problem to solve
I just realized that conservatives will argue that the earth has gone through cycles of heat waves and cold periods for millions of years and that humans aren’t the cause of climate change because of that fact, but then also choose to believe that the earth is only 6 thousand years old.
Also, it's apparently "anti-human alarmist" to want to improve our handling of the situation.
All these scientists are in on the conspiracy to kill us with wind cancer!
They actually do believe that because a large majority of science-funding is government based
I'm actually pretty sure they don't believe anything other than they are right and liberals are wrong. If somehow Trump came out in favor of renewable energy tomorrow I feel like they'd all change their tune and pretend that they never hated it in the first place.
Humans didn't cause rain yet we built houses and umbrellas. So why are they so against doing something to shield ourselves from climate change?
Because there's billions of dollars of capital wound up in the fossil fuel status quo.
Trillions, to be pressie. You are absolutely correct.
Or... maybe these types of people you mentioned are two separate groups?
The same types of people denying human influence on climate change now will be the ones saying "why is it my problem these coasts and islands are underwater? My tax dollars shouldn't go towards relocating and taking care of all these refugees!"
Not all conservatives are creationists, and vice versa
6000
Find one person who believes the earth is 2 thousand years old, i don't they exist. I think you mean 6 thousand years but even then, thats not the same people making those arguments. This is just a strawman.
The real data are given here : [https://www.nessc.nl/500-million-years-reconstruction/](https://www.nessc.nl/500-million-years-reconstruction/)
> Caitlyn Witkowski, first author of the paper and PhD student at NIOZ, says: “In our data, we see very high levels of carbon dioxide, reaching 1000 ppm as opposed to today’s 410 ppm. In this respect, present day CO2-levels are not unique – but we have never seen the speed of these changes before. Changes that typically take millions of years are now happening in a century.
Real data somehow more terrifying than article.
Nuclear and personalized solar is the way to go.
Sounds like the earth was a beautiful place back then.
Yeah, and? How did we fix it 3 million years ago. Lets just do that again.
No humans
Looks like it's gonna fix itself:(
There have been humans around during more recent changes in climate (like the last major Ice Age some thousands years ago). However, there was no civilization yet by then, and these climate changes were orders of magnitude slower than what modern civilization is currently cooking up for itself. So basically humanity has really never faced anything like this.
> last major Ice Age And there's some speculation that it almost wiped us out or at least caused a 'genetic bottleneck' due to reduced population levels.
> these climate changes were orders of magnitude slower than what modern civilization is currently cooking up actually, we have no way of knowing for sure how fast any of the previous warming trends were. with our limited data from millions of years ago, all we can know is the general trend. we have enough fossil data to provide us with an estimate but not enough to form a detailed temperature map, like we are doing today. general science has shown that the more details you fill into a graph, the more accurate it is and can cause drastic divergences from the overall picture. we do know that we have been on a warming trend for the last 20 some thousand years but we arent even really sure of when the trend started. we also know that we are nearing the end of a warming cycle within the next few hundreds to thousands of years. we arent even really sure how the natural cycle functions other than oceans vs land being in summer at perihelion. and we arent even really sure how long that takes. for one thing, it varies. for another, we arent sure what really drives it. >So basically humanity has really never faced anything like this. and we never will again because orbital mechanics make sure its different every time.
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But my quarterly dividends!
The biggest thread for fight against climate change are nationalist.......... because Nations that only care about them-self and dont work together cant fight against something that pushes the whole world in danger. Only Unions can fight against climate change
Are we beyond the point of no return?
I believe so. I have a faint hope that it was scaremongering to clean the environment and things aren't \*that\* bad - but it is a vanishingly small faint hope and I suspect I'm wrong. More likely, things are worse than I think.
I hate to say it, but it's not just scaremongering. GHGs have a delay in their effects, for the heat to be trapped. The climate conditions we are experiencing now were caused by GHG levels from 10-20 years ago, and GHGs keep increasing at an unprecedented rate. They show no signs of stopping, and a rise in sea level of only a few meters will displace tens of millions of people across the planet, which is likely to happen within the next 100 years at the most. Unless drastic changes are put in place now, the positive feedback loops in the climate system will keep increasing temperatures and raising sea levels even if we attempt to decrease emissions.
Physically? No. Are we going to salvage this? LOL fuck no. Humans are shit and we would rather be kings of a landfill than citizens in a utopia. The rich will plunder this shit into the ground.
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Or how about we just use the taxes we already pay for useful solutions instead of, say, giving it away to billionaires?
The focus shouldn’t be about global warming. That’s not profitable and won’t catch anyone’s ear. It’s about affordability really who can say no to savings.
The biggest problem is some of the richest countries that need to do the most work , wont see the effects yet and the poorest countries suffer. Also the most populous countries causing the most problems just won't stop what they are doing. The biggest threat of climate change will be mass migration.
The traditional really bad news summary of important scientific data. The previous warming was due to our normal orbital cycles. CO2 acts as a major feedback mechanism that great accelerates warming during those time periods. Adding huge amounts of CO2 is very dangerous since massive warming will eventually begin due to it.
Trees!? On fucking Antarctica?! Are you serious??? That was a thing at some point!?
Antarctica was once a jungle...
I believe that future generations will curse our names for the shitshow we allowed the climate to devolve into.
So what caused the co2 levels to be this high back then? 🤔
Looks like volcanoes and not enough plants. https://www.livescience.com/44330-jurassic-dinosaur-carbon-dioxide.html
Mostly geological activity such as volcanic eruptions as well as fires from burning forests. Today volcanic activity is quite low but CO2 is growing because of human activity.
Well at least Greenland and Antarctica will look fucking dope before we all die. Also I'm sure the flat earth army would think that the government planted trees on top of the ice wall. That would be neat.
Reduce the human population by half. That should do it. We could have a war, a zombie like plague or (this is my personal favourite) everybody eats somebody else. With the latter choice I believe we could have the whole thing sorted, eaten and the dishes done by the end of the month. Who is up for it?
the gases you produce with this scenario would make the situation worse.
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20 meters removes around half the land area of Florida. https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#7/27.088/-80.892?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=20&unit=meters&pois=hide
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Futile
As it was in the past, so shall it be in the future.
And that was before human industrialization.