Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.
“If we could only slow down carbon…”
The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don’t know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We’ve had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that’s just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women’s rights all made huge political changes. If there’s any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today’s political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don’t think there’s any guarantees, but it’s still a lot too early to give up.
There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc).
You’re only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That’s irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
The closest thing I’ve heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we’re on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it’s not up to me.
Conservation of mass and conservation of energy gives a very easy planetary scale answer to this question.
From an energy standpoint, what it costs to bottle up the CO2 is equal to the following:
Take all the energy (heat + work) that was chemically embodied in all the historical fossil fuels. We need to run all those chemical reactions that released energy again, but this time backwards.
We need to also add the energy it would take to run the thermodynamic change backwards, because the original energy was in concentrated high density form, and now the carbon has dispersed to a low coherence state where it’s stuck in air, ice, water and vegetation all over the place. It all has to come back out which involves major material movements and filtering / transformation
In conclusion, this is more expensive than all the money and energy and materials in the entire human history put together.
That may well be the case, but it’s always a mistake to assume we know everything. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn’t long ago that we didn’t know what germs were, didn’t have electricity, didn’t understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don’t know what we’re going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.
If there’s an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn’t give us that breathing room and doesn’t make things better in the mean time.
Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It’s a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.
I don’t know the long term answer. I don’t think anybody does. But I also don’t think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.
To be clear on what’s required, we would need something like a free infinite energy source that doesn’t pollute at all. It also would have to be rapidly scalable within a decade or so. At that point we could have a giant vacuum cleaner sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. We need to discover this new technology yesterday and it needs to clean the whole planet in about 20 years.
At this point in the story, we are adding about 1% to the CO2 pollution per year. Given the vast scale of the solution we will be coming up with, do you think this extra 1% or 25% will be somehow pivotal?
To me, this is like having pancreatic cancer that’s untreatable by medicine and deciding if you are going to quit smoking or not. Yeah, smoking doesn’t make it better, but in the face of the only cure being basically a miracle, is it actually meaningful to ask this question?
Like, a miracle that can cure an unfixable problem is so huge that do a few extra cigarettes hang in the balance?
I mean…of course you’re right. Slowing down CO2 pollution is very very important. In 1950.
how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
Does it have to be tech? Ocean plankton, peat bogs, forests, etc all do a great job of removing and storing carbon. They’re being destroyed currently, but we could choose to bolster them instead.
According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.
so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?
Hmm?
What you’re talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don’t, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that’s assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections…and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don’t know if it works.
You’re arguing like current climate models predict 8 degrees warming, but my understanding is that a worst case scenario is 4 degrees- the best reference I can find is UN climate summit comparisons[0].
Do you have any references of stuff predicting 8 degrees or is it your personal prediction? If it’s the second, I don’t really have the knowledge to debate current climate models. If it’s the first link me some stuff!
My understanding (based on reading around and nothing else, I’m not a climate scientist) is we’re at 2 degrees already, 3 degrees is likely and 4 degrees would be close enough to catastrophic that talking about 5 degrees isn’t worthwhile. There’s still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.
Long story short, ECS was underestimated for political purposes. If ECS was as high as the paleoclimatology data showed, it would have removed all hope, so scientists completely ignored that scenario going back to the 1990s…
As this paper points out, carbon capture cannot work…the discussion is under the heading “Greenhouse gas emissions situation”.
There’s still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.
Ah, OK! Problem solved. Lol.
This is what everyone is saying. The paper I just linked also said that. But what are the solutions? What does everyone think we can do? How do we avoid the bad situation? I’m genuinely asking.
I have not seen any solution that is fully scoped that gives a specific way of changing anything. They just say we “have time” to do something but they don’t say what to do.
As I stated: we seem to not know what to do.
Hint: this is why you’re nitpicking about the degrees of rise. It’s a typical psychological defense mechanism. If it was 3 or 9 or 17 it would not have any relevance in the face of our utter inability to deal with ANY scenarios regardless of the number.
Thanks for sharing - I feel a little dissapointed that you think I’m “nitpicking”. From my point of view I’m asking you for further details, and you’ve explained really fully.
I’m not some internet troll, just a normal person concerned about climate change, and to this point:
Ah, OK! Problem solved. Lol.
Go back and read my first comment, in no way did I claim climate change was solvable.
Thanks for the paper though, will definitely take it away and read it.
I feel a little dissapointed that you think I’m “nitpicking”.
So …I apologize if that seemed harsh or insulting.
Let me explain from my perspective. Analogy time:
Claim:
You have been a problem gambler for decades and you have a major lifetime debt built up.
Me:
How are you going to get out of debt?
You:
I’m going to gamble less.
Me:
You need to pay back the entire debt!
You:
I can afford the credit card payments if I get a new card with a lower interest rate.
Me:
You’re not hearing what I’m saying.
You:
But the interest rates are only…
Etc.
Like…whoosh…not AT ALL facing the elephant in the room which is that no amount of further INCREASE is a DECREASE!! Like the technical discussion and details are not FULL ACCEPTANCE of the main point I’m making. It’s DENIAL.
Climate change is exactly like this. The scheme you’re discussing is that we can kick the can and “still have time to act”. (Is it 3 degrees or 5? Is it 2 decades or 4? How dire and how immanent is the crisis that is 99.999% inescapable at this point, let’s direct our attention to this and argue?)
This is like when Wile E Coyote runs past the edge of the cliff and hangs in mid air and looks down. But he still has time, he hasn’t started falling yet. Ok…so time for WHAT? What option does Wile E Coyote have that puts him back on the cliff?
This is like gambling more to try to win to solve the gambling problem. If you fail you have dug a bigger quicker grave.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. No one knows what to do about it or they know they can’t stop what’s already been done, so why bother even trying to change. This is what got humans here in the first place, we pretend we know answers when we don’t, or at least say some paltry offering as making a difference. We can adapt to the changes that are coming, but it means reinventing our entire way of life, and the people at the top of the pile don’t t want to upset the system where they are at the top of the pile. Change has to come from the people, forcing the change. Our leaders have proven themselves incapable of breaking from the shackles of the old so we won’t make it to the new way unless we make it happen. We can’t leave it to others anymore, we have to do it.
In general right wing folks don’t believe we have a big problem, which is literal denial.
In general left wing folks believe we can solve the problem easily without much sacrifice, which is denial of the implications.
When right wing people look at left wing people they think the solutions are not going to work and would be a big scary change and a sure loss of our way of life.
When left wing people look at right wing people they think that they are stupid for being pragmatic and realist instead of idealistic and fantastical.
Its a game where both sides blame one another and decades slip comfortably by while we remain deadlocked.
Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable
We absolutely have the technology, it’s just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.
Solar and Wind power are cheap and are infinitely scalable on both small and large scales.
Public transport massively reduces energy requirements for transportation, and scales from bullet trains to light rail. Bike paths combined with ebikes can be used for smaller scales.
Vegan diets massively reduce emissions and energy requirements to produce calories for a population
Iron-air batteries are right now viable as an alternative to fossil fuel powered container ships. They are viable at large scales. For small scale between short distances, sailboats are still quite viable.
High density urban planning done by the Edenicity plan reduces suburban sprawl and massively reduces energy consumption by allowing for an urban area to be energy and food self sufficient. This concept scales to both small villages or large cities.
The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.
A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we’re headed toward.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don’t address the issue if the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is what they’re talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they’re making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn’t sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
I’m aware, but I was addressing that one point at the end of their post about us not having sustainable technology, which I consider distinct from tech that sequesters existing emissions. As in, had we structured our societies with that other tech, it would’ve been fairly sustainable.
For sequestering carbon, I’d read a bit about growing mass amounts of some sort of seaweed or grass in shallow areas being somewhat promising, though ultimately I think we’re locked in for some extreme change regardless. My recommendations of sustainable tech would only limit the ceiling we reach in the future.
So, there is a natural carbon cycle, natural nitrogen cycle etc.
On planet earth, the nitrogen cycle of the whole planet is only 50% of what humans need to eat every year. If you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.
We are locked into an artificial life support system. Our agriculture system creates more CO2 than all the cars being driven by a factor of 3.
We have no technology that is waiting to fix this. There is no “fix” where lots of people wouldn’t die directly.
We DO NOT have sustainable technologies. For humans, we are committed to planetary overshoot if we stay alive, we have been in planetary overshoot for many generations already.
Your list of “solutions” are not real things that make significant change. Sorry. They slow down the worsening but they will not even extend civilization by one extra generation. You have been duped into thinking about this the wrong way.
Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials. Our ancestors didn’t build cities to permanently live in until they had cheap surplus energy and a way to store it. I have something to warn you about…so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.
The idea that wind and solar are infinitely scalable has actually been properly studied in the literature. For example, Mark Jacobson has a fully elucidated picture of what that would look like globally. If I remember correctly, he calls for every river on earth to be dammed for hydro, windmills covering every continent and around 200 solar panels for every living human AND major deductions in energy usage. This is a more highly industrialized future than any previous human project. He did not explore the material or energy costs of building this system. So for instance, on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone it’s surprising if we can build them all windmills, batteries, wiring, solar panels and power dams. But…you know…we have to dream right? The main headline is that “the possibility is infinite”. I actually don’t believe that, it seems like all these large scale programs are already failing in many ways. Not that they aren’t the best idea we have, they are just not working out.
By the way , we could also eat insects ground into a protein mush instead of actual vegetables.
f you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.
David R. Montgomery puts forward some interesting evidence that the world could be fed without industrial farming, and there are promising new methods of creating artificial fertilizer using renewable energy instead of the fossil fuel using habor-bosch method.
Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials.
Cities use far less energy and materials than less dense suburbs or rural living, which require moving materials and energy further than cities to dwellings that are far less energy efficient. I get the feeling you didn’t actually look at the links I provided regarding how with the right planning, cities could be made self-sufficient and the most sustainable way of living, as you continue to suggest that they cannot be, even though the math in those videos indicate the opposite.
so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.
I never said cities as they exist today are desirable or sustainable, nor was that the inquiry you made to me. You asked what existing technologies we had to live sustainably. I think I made a solid case that we do have the existing ideas and technology to do so, but they are simply not implemented for reasons unrelated to their actual technical viability.
on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone
And this is a completely artificial social problem, not a technical one, which is what I’ve been mentioning in each response.
Capitalism is ultimately responsible for a tremendous amount of that artificial scarcity of food, housing, and transport, as profit incentives cause powerful corporations to suppress or eliminate solutions that would jeopardize that profit. Farmers during the depression destroyed food while the hungry watched to protect the market, affordable housing isn’t created because it isn’t as profitable as expensive housing, rent caps aren’t implemented because real estate monopolies and landlords lobby politicians to ensure their profits continue to rise, public transport was gutted by monopolists in the oil, car, and tire industry for their continued profit.
As long as capitalism rules us, we will struggle to implement the tools that could save millions of people from dying, all for the benefit of a few psychopaths. I strongly believe we will continue on the path of destruction unless there is a nearly global rejection of capitalism as the main form of societal structure. I don’t know for sure if we will eventually cast it off and survive, but I’m sure as hell going to try to slow down the amount of emissions we spew out in the hopes it gives us a sliver more time for that to potentially happen.
Whether or not you believe it’s possible for humanity to actually do that depends entirely on how cynical your worldview is. In practical terms, a fully cynical view only guarantees a fail-state, which doesn’t seem like a useful mindset to have. So I will continue to do as much as I am realistically able to help the possibility of resisting capitalism, as it’s our only real way out, and I’ll be happier with myself that I tried, even if we fail.
Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a “flow” or “rate” problem.
“If we could only slow down carbon…”
The thing is that what we have is a “sink” or “stock” problem where it’s how much carbon is already in the system – it’s past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn’t from the rate of this year’s contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it’s from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn’t put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you’re feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don’t know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We’ve had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that’s just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women’s rights all made huge political changes. If there’s any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today’s political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don’t think there’s any guarantees, but it’s still a lot too early to give up.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere
You’re only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That’s irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what’s the tech for that?
The closest thing I’ve heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
That’s geoengineering to reduce the strength of sunlight to get heat down. It has to be repeated indefinitely, forever, or heat increases again.
Also, it doesn’t reverse what’s causing climate change by removing carbon.
Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we’re on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it’s not up to me.
Conservation of mass and conservation of energy gives a very easy planetary scale answer to this question.
From an energy standpoint, what it costs to bottle up the CO2 is equal to the following:
Take all the energy (heat + work) that was chemically embodied in all the historical fossil fuels. We need to run all those chemical reactions that released energy again, but this time backwards.
We need to also add the energy it would take to run the thermodynamic change backwards, because the original energy was in concentrated high density form, and now the carbon has dispersed to a low coherence state where it’s stuck in air, ice, water and vegetation all over the place. It all has to come back out which involves major material movements and filtering / transformation
In conclusion, this is more expensive than all the money and energy and materials in the entire human history put together.
Unless…
Do you know of any magic?
That may well be the case, but it’s always a mistake to assume we know everything. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn’t long ago that we didn’t know what germs were, didn’t have electricity, didn’t understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don’t know what we’re going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.
If there’s an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn’t give us that breathing room and doesn’t make things better in the mean time.
Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It’s a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.
I don’t know the long term answer. I don’t think anybody does. But I also don’t think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.
To be clear on what’s required, we would need something like a free infinite energy source that doesn’t pollute at all. It also would have to be rapidly scalable within a decade or so. At that point we could have a giant vacuum cleaner sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. We need to discover this new technology yesterday and it needs to clean the whole planet in about 20 years.
At this point in the story, we are adding about 1% to the CO2 pollution per year. Given the vast scale of the solution we will be coming up with, do you think this extra 1% or 25% will be somehow pivotal?
To me, this is like having pancreatic cancer that’s untreatable by medicine and deciding if you are going to quit smoking or not. Yeah, smoking doesn’t make it better, but in the face of the only cure being basically a miracle, is it actually meaningful to ask this question?
Like, a miracle that can cure an unfixable problem is so huge that do a few extra cigarettes hang in the balance?
I mean…of course you’re right. Slowing down CO2 pollution is very very important. In 1950.
(We do not have 50 years. Lol.)
Does it have to be tech? Ocean plankton, peat bogs, forests, etc all do a great job of removing and storing carbon. They’re being destroyed currently, but we could choose to bolster them instead.
Those are also technologies, just not high tech.
Here is a question then:
According to the science, the ocean current changes are going to start driving climate change via a doubling of present day CO2. When the permafrost melts it will create as much additional CO2 as all human industry does on a repeating annual basis right now. This is an all natural process where CO2 pollution will snowball faster and faster with no human ability to adjust it.
so, do you think natural processes like growing trees have the potential where they going to erase that much feedback? Keeping in mind that the peat bogs, forests and ocean plankton we have today in a less damaged ecosystem ALREADY failed to curtail a much smaller human created CO2 pulse?
Hmm?
What you’re talking about is BECCS, by the way. Believe me or don’t, but the UN climate change panel already included this in all the accounting! Like, what the projections for the future say is that we are going to invent these technologies and deploy them and erase the CO2, and that’s assumed to be real and already factored into all the future projections…and they are still talking about 8 degrees of warming even including that. Notwithstanding that we have never done this yet and don’t know if it works.
I guess maybe I’m missing something?
You’re arguing like current climate models predict 8 degrees warming, but my understanding is that a worst case scenario is 4 degrees- the best reference I can find is UN climate summit comparisons[0].
Do you have any references of stuff predicting 8 degrees or is it your personal prediction? If it’s the second, I don’t really have the knowledge to debate current climate models. If it’s the first link me some stuff!
My understanding (based on reading around and nothing else, I’m not a climate scientist) is we’re at 2 degrees already, 3 degrees is likely and 4 degrees would be close enough to catastrophic that talking about 5 degrees isn’t worthwhile. There’s still margin for human society to stop the worst of outcomes.
[0]https://unclimatesummit.org/comparing-climate-impacts-at-1-5c-2c-3c-and-4c/
Equilibrium global warming for TODAY’S co2 concentration is 10°.
Here is one reference, this number is right in the paper’s abstract: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false
Long story short, ECS was underestimated for political purposes. If ECS was as high as the paleoclimatology data showed, it would have removed all hope, so scientists completely ignored that scenario going back to the 1990s…
As this paper points out, carbon capture cannot work…the discussion is under the heading “Greenhouse gas emissions situation”.
Ah, OK! Problem solved. Lol.
This is what everyone is saying. The paper I just linked also said that. But what are the solutions? What does everyone think we can do? How do we avoid the bad situation? I’m genuinely asking.
I have not seen any solution that is fully scoped that gives a specific way of changing anything. They just say we “have time” to do something but they don’t say what to do.
As I stated: we seem to not know what to do.
Hint: this is why you’re nitpicking about the degrees of rise. It’s a typical psychological defense mechanism. If it was 3 or 9 or 17 it would not have any relevance in the face of our utter inability to deal with ANY scenarios regardless of the number.
Thanks for sharing - I feel a little dissapointed that you think I’m “nitpicking”. From my point of view I’m asking you for further details, and you’ve explained really fully.
I’m not some internet troll, just a normal person concerned about climate change, and to this point:
Go back and read my first comment, in no way did I claim climate change was solvable.
Thanks for the paper though, will definitely take it away and read it.
So …I apologize if that seemed harsh or insulting.
Let me explain from my perspective. Analogy time:
Claim: You have been a problem gambler for decades and you have a major lifetime debt built up.
Me: How are you going to get out of debt?
You: I’m going to gamble less.
Me: You need to pay back the entire debt!
You: I can afford the credit card payments if I get a new card with a lower interest rate.
Me: You’re not hearing what I’m saying.
You: But the interest rates are only…
Etc.
Like…whoosh…not AT ALL facing the elephant in the room which is that no amount of further INCREASE is a DECREASE!! Like the technical discussion and details are not FULL ACCEPTANCE of the main point I’m making. It’s DENIAL.
Climate change is exactly like this. The scheme you’re discussing is that we can kick the can and “still have time to act”. (Is it 3 degrees or 5? Is it 2 decades or 4? How dire and how immanent is the crisis that is 99.999% inescapable at this point, let’s direct our attention to this and argue?)
This is like when Wile E Coyote runs past the edge of the cliff and hangs in mid air and looks down. But he still has time, he hasn’t started falling yet. Ok…so time for WHAT? What option does Wile E Coyote have that puts him back on the cliff?
This is like gambling more to try to win to solve the gambling problem. If you fail you have dug a bigger quicker grave.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. No one knows what to do about it or they know they can’t stop what’s already been done, so why bother even trying to change. This is what got humans here in the first place, we pretend we know answers when we don’t, or at least say some paltry offering as making a difference. We can adapt to the changes that are coming, but it means reinventing our entire way of life, and the people at the top of the pile don’t t want to upset the system where they are at the top of the pile. Change has to come from the people, forcing the change. Our leaders have proven themselves incapable of breaking from the shackles of the old so we won’t make it to the new way unless we make it happen. We can’t leave it to others anymore, we have to do it.
Yep. There is a lot of hubris.
In general right wing folks don’t believe we have a big problem, which is literal denial.
In general left wing folks believe we can solve the problem easily without much sacrifice, which is denial of the implications.
When right wing people look at left wing people they think the solutions are not going to work and would be a big scary change and a sure loss of our way of life.
When left wing people look at right wing people they think that they are stupid for being pragmatic and realist instead of idealistic and fantastical.
Its a game where both sides blame one another and decades slip comfortably by while we remain deadlocked.
We absolutely have the technology, it’s just being blocked from being implemented on emergency timescales by soulless oil and gas corpo suits that have almost de-facto control of governments in most countries.
What’s an example of the technology, and can you explain what scale it works at?
The tech is there. The only thing stopping us is a lack of political will due to capitalism resulting in oligarchs who have captured the political system, and a lack of public awareness of alternative ways of life due to poor education and propaganda.
A properly informed public that understands the extreme dangers of climate change, oligarchic capitalism, and the viability of changing things with collective power would allow us to use these existing technologies and prevent the devastation we’re headed toward.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don’t address the issue if the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is what they’re talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they’re making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn’t sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
I’m aware, but I was addressing that one point at the end of their post about us not having sustainable technology, which I consider distinct from tech that sequesters existing emissions. As in, had we structured our societies with that other tech, it would’ve been fairly sustainable.
For sequestering carbon, I’d read a bit about growing mass amounts of some sort of seaweed or grass in shallow areas being somewhat promising, though ultimately I think we’re locked in for some extreme change regardless. My recommendations of sustainable tech would only limit the ceiling we reach in the future.
So, there is a natural carbon cycle, natural nitrogen cycle etc.
On planet earth, the nitrogen cycle of the whole planet is only 50% of what humans need to eat every year. If you don’t have artificial fertilizers, tractors, refrigerators etc etc, there is no way people can be fed even if they are everything that nature created.
We are locked into an artificial life support system. Our agriculture system creates more CO2 than all the cars being driven by a factor of 3.
We have no technology that is waiting to fix this. There is no “fix” where lots of people wouldn’t die directly.
We DO NOT have sustainable technologies. For humans, we are committed to planetary overshoot if we stay alive, we have been in planetary overshoot for many generations already.
Your list of “solutions” are not real things that make significant change. Sorry. They slow down the worsening but they will not even extend civilization by one extra generation. You have been duped into thinking about this the wrong way.
Cities are giant factories that require the constant cycling of goods (food, water and other materials) using a transportation grid and they also require constant energy inputs to remove waste materials. Our ancestors didn’t build cities to permanently live in until they had cheap surplus energy and a way to store it. I have something to warn you about…so your idea about edencity and public transportation is like you almost see how unsustainable cities are, and why.
The idea that wind and solar are infinitely scalable has actually been properly studied in the literature. For example, Mark Jacobson has a fully elucidated picture of what that would look like globally. If I remember correctly, he calls for every river on earth to be dammed for hydro, windmills covering every continent and around 200 solar panels for every living human AND major deductions in energy usage. This is a more highly industrialized future than any previous human project. He did not explore the material or energy costs of building this system. So for instance, on a planet where we cannot feed, build houses and build transport for everyone it’s surprising if we can build them all windmills, batteries, wiring, solar panels and power dams. But…you know…we have to dream right? The main headline is that “the possibility is infinite”. I actually don’t believe that, it seems like all these large scale programs are already failing in many ways. Not that they aren’t the best idea we have, they are just not working out.
By the way , we could also eat insects ground into a protein mush instead of actual vegetables.
David R. Montgomery puts forward some interesting evidence that the world could be fed without industrial farming, and there are promising new methods of creating artificial fertilizer using renewable energy instead of the fossil fuel using habor-bosch method.
Cities use far less energy and materials than less dense suburbs or rural living, which require moving materials and energy further than cities to dwellings that are far less energy efficient. I get the feeling you didn’t actually look at the links I provided regarding how with the right planning, cities could be made self-sufficient and the most sustainable way of living, as you continue to suggest that they cannot be, even though the math in those videos indicate the opposite.
I never said cities as they exist today are desirable or sustainable, nor was that the inquiry you made to me. You asked what existing technologies we had to live sustainably. I think I made a solid case that we do have the existing ideas and technology to do so, but they are simply not implemented for reasons unrelated to their actual technical viability.
And this is a completely artificial social problem, not a technical one, which is what I’ve been mentioning in each response.
Capitalism is ultimately responsible for a tremendous amount of that artificial scarcity of food, housing, and transport, as profit incentives cause powerful corporations to suppress or eliminate solutions that would jeopardize that profit. Farmers during the depression destroyed food while the hungry watched to protect the market, affordable housing isn’t created because it isn’t as profitable as expensive housing, rent caps aren’t implemented because real estate monopolies and landlords lobby politicians to ensure their profits continue to rise, public transport was gutted by monopolists in the oil, car, and tire industry for their continued profit.
As long as capitalism rules us, we will struggle to implement the tools that could save millions of people from dying, all for the benefit of a few psychopaths. I strongly believe we will continue on the path of destruction unless there is a nearly global rejection of capitalism as the main form of societal structure. I don’t know for sure if we will eventually cast it off and survive, but I’m sure as hell going to try to slow down the amount of emissions we spew out in the hopes it gives us a sliver more time for that to potentially happen.
Whether or not you believe it’s possible for humanity to actually do that depends entirely on how cynical your worldview is. In practical terms, a fully cynical view only guarantees a fail-state, which doesn’t seem like a useful mindset to have. So I will continue to do as much as I am realistically able to help the possibility of resisting capitalism, as it’s our only real way out, and I’ll be happier with myself that I tried, even if we fail.