I am the most worried I've ever been, there's not a lot I can do personally, since it's such a big collective action problem and it's not a good feeling.
I am also concerned so I reoriented my career to support environmental advocacy. Forget sorting your recyclables. Go make a career in alternative energy, alternative transportation, geoengineering or environmental advocacy. I guarantee you will be able to do more for this issue than tweeting or donating online. I have saved my organization more in infrastructure costs than I will ever earn in my lifetime.
The paperclip maximizers are here and they will turn the entire surface of the earth into plastic wrap and data centers. Choose to dedicate the productive capacity of your life to something else.
Sure! There's many jobs out there that will help solve climate and energy. You don't have to found the company yourself or personally invent the new battery technology. Many companies exist already and need all kinds of professionals: software dev, finance, marketing, data analysis and more. Many companies work on products that will help us adapt and mitigate climate change. Tesla is the famous one, but there are entire industries. Then there's the nonprofit space. There are dozens of green groups working in the USA alone, ones you've definitely heard of and ones you haven't. Universities are conducting important research and educating on these issues. And there's government as well, scientists, regulators and policymakers.
I've been working in the nonprofit space for 10 years and trust me when I say that we need highly capable and motivated tech professionals. Go here and start looking at job postings in your country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_organiza...
No one person will solve a planet-scale issue like climate change, but each person who decides to pick up a bucket and start bailing water will mitigate the impact. Be the change.
More undergraduates emerge each year, with eco-oriented training, than there are places to fill, in the USA. Good "jobs" in this space are often filled with people with advanced training and some level of being independently wealthy, working for below-cost-of-living, no children, etc.. It is ordinary for big dot-orgs to ask for free work, even when there is a budget, here in the US. Behind the scenes, certain groups have pooled money and invested it, while fundraising and asking for volunteers. The truth is, this is partly necessary, because "money" is not being created, money is being spent. There is a long-term fundraising need for this work, and it shows in unexpected ways, sometimes tough to see in action.
> ' trust me when I say that we need highly capable and motivated tech professionals.'
You need highly talented professionals, to do things like geoengineering, you say? You mean those aircraft that fly constantly over my farm spraying who knows what toxic compounds into the air, in order to alter the climate, while calling me a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist simply for noticing this? You need me to help you with your schemes?
(Disclaimer: I know the people who created both of those, so I guess I'm biased as to their quality, but I really do think they're very valuable resources.)
There are also some great Slack groups for technologists who are worried about climate change:
I'm also part of the Sunrise Movement[0], which has significantly pushed US politics in the direction of actually doing something about about climate change. I'm working on various software projects for them, and would love to help anyone who's interested get involved in that. Feel free to email me -- my email's in my profile.
I started a YIMBY group in my city. How are cities are built determines so much else about our lives, like how far people have to drive - or if maybe they could ride bikes or walk instead.
I don't see a path to doing that full time, though.
I think humanity can handle (adapt to) the combo of forests burning, ocean acidification, and thawing tundra. At great cost, measured in lives, gold, and lost opportunities, of course.
Until recently I considered the "clathrate gun" to be an extermination event. The earth hasn't had those level of CO2 and methane (in the air) since the Eocene (~2000 CO2 ppm). It's hard to imagine industry and agriculture functioning in that context.
But perhaps humans are more resilient. There's growing evidence validating the Young Dryas theory, where the global temps plunged and then spiked 1000 years later. Somehow humans survived, even though our fledgeling civilization was reset.
> The earth hasn't had those level of CO2 and methane (in the air) since the Eocene (~2000 CO2 ppm). It's hard to imagine industry and agriculture functioning in that context.
Not to mention our brains. Cognitive ability declines significantly as CO2 concentration rises.
We'll all die. It's not so terrifying as depressing. Clathrate gun means death for essentially everyone. Maybe Bezos and Musk are right to make off planet life temporarily viable. Modern society is based on relatively predictable large scale agriculture being able to redistribute goods (transportation infra, tech to support distribution). We simply, as a society, are not capable of adapting to those circumstances. Most humans would die and the survivors would not enjoy a modern lifestyle.
The nice thing is I'm not saving anything for retirement since the world is ending soon. I'm laughing at all my coworkers worrying about their 401K matches.
That's not smart. Just look at the simplified game tree. What's your utility of what you're putting in a 401k? If we save the world you won't be destitute in old age.
I think the same as you do, although I'm still saving money (maybe to blow it all in a good party). But a worry I have is, what if there's a way for a low percentage of people to survive, but it would cost mucho money? (Welcome to hyper-capitalism). Imagine if you could've joined this Noah's ark had you saved enough..
Not that 401ks will mean much if society collapses...
> Maybe Bezos and Musk are right to make off planet life temporarily viable.
That doesn't make sense. Even if Earth gets completely fubar, there's NO WAY IN HELL that it's going to easier to move to Mars. Mars is waaaaay harder to 'fix' than earth and this is not going to change in many thousands of years.
Living on planets doesn't really make much sense in the long run. We talk about doing it, and terraforming planets, because we're familiar with living on planets.
Bezos sees that, though. He's a big fan of O'Neill cylinders and similar. It's Musk who wants to go try and get us to live on Mars.
I agree with Neil Gaiman and the many, many climate scientists watching this unfold that the Australian, Canadian and Californian fires are only the tip of a very large iceberg. Policy wise I think politics needs to plan to cope with living in a 4-5C world and action wise we need to do everything we can to try and plateau in a 2-3C world.
I totally agree wildfires are getting worse because of climate change.
But... I was asked about the far larger and far worse fires Australia had in 1974-1975, and why those were related just to mismanagement and these are related to climate change. I didn't have an answer, does anyone?
It is likely that 100 year events, calculated on the basis of historical data are overly optimistic. That is, these events will occur with higher frequency. However, "every year"? The only way to make that a correct statement is to say that there is at least one 100 year event (fire flood earthquake viral outbreak, etc.) happening in each year globally. But that has essentially always been true. "100 year event" really only has any meaning when talking about a specific event: e.g., category V hurricane landing within 50 miles of Houston.
1. It is not as if global warming wasn't happening in 1974-75. It is just that the signal was MUCH weaker, the amount of historical and contemporary data was MUCH less, our confidence in climate modeling was much lower, and processing power was much less for actually running our models. To say that 1974-75 was not related to climate change at all is likely wrong. But certainly, the amount of human-induced global warming was significantly less too, so it is likely that 74-75 had other larger underlying reasons.
Right! So things in the 1970s were climate crisis too, we just didn't know about it. Good point.
Anywhere I could look up and see what the global degree increase was in the 1970s? I imagine this might be hard to find because they thought largely that the climate was cooling then, no?
Just look at any IPCC report, it probably is a good starting point. That is all very well known to the extent allowed by science at the time. The greenhouse effect was well known. Exxon essentially predicted the level of warming we've seen in the late 70s/early 80s in internal reports. Nobody really think the climate was cooling. There was one magazine cover, once, that has been grossly blown out of proportion.
Scientists and science-fiction has been dealing with/talking about climate crisis since the 50s/60s. A lot of the early stuff is tied in with some wrong (since disproven) Malthusian beliefs, but a since of post-fossil fuel-related climate change is an undercurrent through a lot of sci-fi. Even just looking at well known pop culture artifacts, climate crisis is a component of the films Logan's Run and Soylent Green in the 70s.
You can't read an exact "degree increase" around the 70s on that chart, but you can clearly see the seventies is in a notable slope/gradient as is everything post-world wars.
Agreed. I like that chart too. But doesn't it pretty much show that from 1800 to 1920 that the damage was already done? It was steady for 3000+ years then jumped drastically over a 120 year span.
edit: Obviously not "damage is done" let's not care, but rather, how little emissions started the slope change.
Totally! But look at the 1800-1900 mark, what were the emissions then? It's crazy just how little CO2 was released that made that sharp flow immediately start, I would have thought the would be some ramp up phase, but I guess not!
Isn't it amazing how little CO2 from 1800-1900 was released compared to today? But it still kicked off this drastic change in slope?
I'm very skeptical would could in our best efforts globally get down to 1900 levels just given how many more people there are, and they need to eat.
I don't think it was that "little"; 1800-1900 encompassed a lot of early fossil fuel usage, including a lot of coal and nearly extinguishing whales for burnable oils. There was also a great deal of deforestation. Don't forget to take into account efficiency improvements in your mental estimates of how much CO2 was released, we don't produce that much more CO2 than the 1800s because we do a lot more with less. (An LED lamp compared to a whale oil lamp is an amazing difference in carbon output thanks to all sorts of efficiency gains.)
Certainly, we are in trouble if our goal is to somehow get back to pre-1800 temperature levels. Which is why the goal setting has always "merely" been to try stop the current slope from so dangerously remaining exponential, and has never been about entirely undoing the effects of man-made climate change. As a species, we can try solve that after we've done what we can about the present problems of that sharp forecasted curve.
It’s not a direct answer to your question and I don’t have a reference to hand but I found it interesting. I read that the 74-75 fires were a fairly different situation - the year before there was anomalously high rainfall which lead to a large amount of unsupportable grass growth. The grass grew over a huge but primarily uninhabited area, died, and dried out. When it caught fire the next year it was allowed to burn uncontrolled. So it was primarily grass being allowed to burn in remote areas versus the current situation which involves more forest and is being actively fought.
I would wonder why. Why would wildfires get worse because of climate change?
Wildfires need an accumulation of fuel. Climate change could produce the fuel, but that would be a process of decades. Indeed, bad fires in 1975 -- 45 years later there is enough fuel.
Which would mean that the mechanism would be: climate change -> growth of fuel -> burn.
I think 4-5C is a pretty reasonable assumption, over the next century.
The thing is that most of our current action plan for climate change consists of reducing CO2 emissions, and this is woefully inadequate for a world that the most recent science indicates has already passed the tipping point. Among the second-order changes that we should be preparing for:
1. Migration as the new norm. A 4-5C temperature rise will shift equivalent biomes over 1000 miles northward/southward, and inundate large coastal areas where major populations are currently located. Major densely-populated areas will become uninhabitable, and currently uninhabitable areas will become fertile.
2. The collapse of governments, and of the nation-state system. When migration becomes the new norm, borders become irrelevant, as do settled homogenous populations. What's the new political organization look like?
3. Large temporary food shortages. Higher temperatures, higher rainfall, and higher CO2 levels actually mean that in the long-term, plant growth and agricultural productivity will increase, and the earth's carrying capacity should go up. But in the short term - a lot of our current crops are hyper-specialized to their existing climate, and land rights, water rights, & physical crop location become problematic. Food distribution becomes critical - we'll likely make enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but the people who grow it may not want to share (or may have the inability to trade) with the people who need it.
4. Expect to see more diseases emerge. Large migrations, changes in biomes, and increased human habitation of formerly virgin ecosystems all spell chances for pathogens to jump from animal hosts to people and spread widely.
Overall, I'm a lot more scared of the likelihood that humans will kill each other than that the environment will kill us. We have a unique tendency to blame each other for unwelcome changes rather than to adapt to them.
> We have a unique tendency to blame each other for unwelcome changes rather than to adapt to them.
The collective freakout in the USA over the migrant "caravan" really cemented this point for me. It's like... jeez people, do you have any idea what we're in for in the next few decades?
It's a really good time to start building the capacity to effectively and ethically handle big influxes of people (which works out demographically for the US anyway, as the birth rate drops). Unfortunately, we seem to be doing the exact opposite.
> It's a really good time to start building the capacity to effectively and ethically handle big influxes of people
The problem with that is, that one of the bases of Capitalism is the maintenance of SCARCITY. That is, it's necessary to put most people in a situation of want, of low availability of resources, products, services - so that they have no choice but to work for capital-owners (= owners of commercial companies) to make a living. But to provide a decent life for a lot of incoming people means that there has to be an available glut of a lot of stuff.
We should also consider that as the ambient CO2 density rises we're also going to lose a lot of our cognitive function. If we're going to rely on nuclear energy to see us through we might need to rely on AI to carry on operations for us.
I'm skeptical of that claim without some good supporting evidence. Submarines tend to maintain CO2 concentrations 10x higher than atmospheric, and they have a better reactor safety record than civilian power plants.
My understanding is that once you start cloud seeding, you can't really stop...if you stop, you'll have runaway warming at a significantly accelerated rate[0].
I'm pretty wary of geoengineering, just because we don't really know the second/third/nth-order effects geoengineering solutions might have. I'm not saying it should never be done, but I think much more research is in order before doing something that literally affects the entire planet.
Accelerated Olivine weathering is my geoengineering method of choice. It's exactly how the earth brought itself back into equilibrium over millions of years after the mass extinction events. As an added bonus it fixes the acidity of the oceans.
I think we'll see some citizens become more nationalist, while the number of people who are either stateless or consider themselves only loosely attached to a state grows dramatically. At the same time non-state organizations (multinational corporations, drug cartels, city-states, religious fundamentalists) will grow in power to fill the void left by the shrunken state, taking over many of the functions of the state like physical security, dispute resolution, taxation, infrastructure, etc.
This is already happening as well: while the hinterlands of Britain voted for Brexit, it was widely unpopular in London, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and other regions, and may lead to the breakup of the UK. I could easily see a future where cities declare their independence and then organize a loose global confederation of free-trade agreements and mutual assistance pacts, leaving behind rump states ruling over the rural areas of what used to be their country. Then add in private corporations (incubated within the cities) to provide physical security for travelers and migrants who pay for the service.
Adding local regulation that doesn't contradict state law isn't that difficult. The difficult part is getting nation-states to exempt such states from much of the national law.
Humanity produces sooo much food already, and that's with a huge fraction of people in under-developed countries doing low-yield production. Food shortages these days are artificial, in the sense that the deciding factors are socio-political, not physical/climatic.
Other than that, agreed. I'm very worried popular movements will not be strong enough to prevent the emergence of authoritarian regimes who try to keep the migrating masses out with extreme violence (a more extreme version of how Europe has been trying to stop the flow of immigrants from Syria and Libya).
Difficult to say since we don't even know what technology we'll discover in 10 years from now.
If you look at the wildfires in Russia from 2010 which helped trigger the Arab revolutions in 2011 it should give you an idea. That occurred 10 years ago when we weren't even at +1C.
> Rockström [director of the Potsdam institute] doesn’t like our chances. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that,” he says. “There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.”
Gotta love this "some yet-existing technology will solve all our problems!" mindset.. /s
Might as well have faith in Jesus at this point, if you're just going to pray to non-existant future tech.
E.g. I think a lot people have prayed for a solution to solve problems like aging, but several millennia of civilization, and we're still aging and dying.
I dunno if "technology [will] solve it"... We'll have droughts, famine, and 16k 8g streaming VR porn.
We already have the capability to solve it (we created it), it's just not profitable enough to start trying yet. Or at least it will be unfathomably more profitable when people are faced with life or death situations.
I feel like I keep seeing articles covering climate-related events/disasters happening Sooner Than Expected™. I'm already doing my best to reduce my personal impact and raise awareness in my social circle, but it's worrying that the biggest doomsday predictions might actually come true.
The change needs to be systemic, which is the problem. Logistics, industry and agriculture make up the vast majority of emissions. But for these things to change prices will have to rise probably quite dramatically.
We’ve gotten so used to not paying for the externalities associated with emissions it’s damn near impossible to shift gears. Even at the individual level people are often only willing to do it when the cost increase is marginal.
If we taxed emissions at every level things would get so expensive people would riot.
I think we just have to accept that our society is not designed in a way that we can deal with this. We will have to let the catastrophe happen before there will be any real change. Even then their may not be change. We just have to wait for enough people to die for the system to fall back into balance.
Your observations, calculus, and conclusions are correct.
I'd only suggest that we're already paying for those externalities. It's just that those costs are off book. So the feedback loops are broken. Making improvements all but impossible.
A carbon tax would update our accounting rules to capture those costs in a direct and efficient manner.
The fundamental problem with the Carbon Market is that we are missing the entire second half of the equation. There is no viable large scale carbon removal technologies that would allow us to set a price per ton of carbon released. The market doesn't work because it is all supply and no demand.
If we were serious about this there would be hundreds or thousands of companies competing on the most cost effective way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. All companies would be required to buy enough carbon removal to make them zero net emissions. When you buy a gallon of gas it would have whatever the current market value of 5.5lbs of carbon removal factored in right at the pump. Or that would happen at the refinery and be reflected in the final price of the gas.
Unfortunately if you wanted to jump start this market it would be very disruptive to the global economy. Governments worldwide (it's too easy to export pollution, this needs to be a worldwide solution) would have to agree on a very high price to get the market started to avoid undercutting companies wanting to get into it and let the money start forming a pile so terrifically large that people would be scrambling to develop carbon capture technologies faster and cheaper than the competition. There would be a lot of cheating and lying that would need to be policed worldwide. Our current system of governments is not capable of pulling this off.
Carbon markets are something people try to entice capitalists with, but only because they don't think people will look at the details. To actually implement them would send those same capitalists howling and screaming to their nearest governmental body with exceptions and rollbacks in hand.
Most serious carbon market proposals are not primarily related to removal/sequestration. They are related to reducing emissions. You get credits for emitting less and/or producing low emission technologies (solar panels, EVs, etc.), and can sell them or use them to reduce your tax burden.
That's just a tax with makeup. That's why they never work in the real world, and why they fall apart under any political pressure.
The point of the market is that it provides political pressure from companies on both ends so it is insulated from political whims, at least to some degree. If some company wants to grease their local politicians to get exceptions or have the price set low they get pushback from other companies that want to redeem those credits at full price.
Its not that they aren't primarily related to it, most proposals are neutral as to whether a ton of CO2 is avoided or sequestered. It just so happens to be the case that its relatively expensive to capture and sequester CO2 from the atmosphere compared to emissions avoidance. The lowest hanging fruit is efficiency (better insulation, more efficient appliances, cars, etc), followed by lower carbon forms of electricity, etc.
We'll likely need to do sequestration but, assuming a gradually rising carbon price, it won't make economic sense to do it at scale until we've done the more cost effective things first.
The nice thing about working markets is that it would naturally pressure people to do the cost effective stuff first. If buying carbon offsets is appropriately expensive you have a major incentive to avoid buying them.
Thought experiment: It would be interesting if you could somehow reverse centuries of terrible marketing on blood diamonds and make sequestered/captured "man-made" diamonds more valuable to the average person than ones mined, you might find a lot more interest in sequestration/capture.
Pinning carbon pounds to diamond prices might still be an interesting idea. At about 2268 carats per pound, the 2016 per carat cost of diamond at $30,925 (USD) gives us $70,137,900 (USD) per pound of carbon. That actually sounds like a reasonable base price to set carbon taxes/market rates, given what we know/expect of carbon models lately. (No idea how you'd bootstrap that without crashing modern society, but this is currently still mostly a thought experiment.)
Math aside, this highlights that the core problem is people. Too many people. The solution to a lot of the “worlds problems” is less people. A Thanos-style snap would be great for humanity if it was possible.
Not at all. The vast majority of greenhouse gas production has been in industrial processes. While sure, all of that is largely in service to people, it isn't people (and people would be just as happy with similar processes that had fewer externality problems like greenhouse gases; the underlying problem there is Capitalism doesn't take such externalities into account in choosing between alternatives). The early Malthusian models were wrong and this sort of eugenics talk is counter-productive, if not sick/dangerous.
> carbon removal technologies that would allow us to set a price per ton of carbon released
Interesting idea. This reminds me of the "Future Cost Function" used in my country to decide the marginal cost of another MWh of hydroelectric generation. Since this country generates over half of its power from hydroelectricity, and the amount of rain varies seasonally (and also depends on the conditions of both the Pacific and the Atlantic), there's always the question: should we use more of the water from the dams, or should we save the water for later and use the thermal generators instead? If we use too much water, and the next rainy season doesn't rain enough, the reservoirs could run dry (which is really bad, since we don't have enough thermal generators); if we save too much water, we're wasting money on expensive fuel (and in the worst case, the reservoirs could get full and have to throw away the excess water, without having the chance to use it to generate electricity). The "Future Cost Function" model simulates the future cost of the thermal generation for several scenarios, to arrive at a cost for the water which minimizes the total cost (given that less costly generators are dispatched first, so a higher cost for the water means more and more costly thermal generators will be dispatched).
What you propose seems similar: you are suggesting to use something we can easily measure (the cost of removing one ton of CO2 from the air) to decide a price for something which would appear to have a zero price otherwise (the cost of emitting one ton of CO2 into the air). I would go even further, given the similarities with what I described above, and somehow put a "target concentration" in the formula, so that initially the cost is higher (to fund removal for the extra CO2 which is already there) and automatically winds down to near zero if the concentration gets near the target (or even overshoots it).
I wouldn't worry about that last point too much. We've already put so much extra carbon into the atmosphere that even with large scale decarbonization we won't make a dent in the problem in our lifetime.
> If we taxed emissions at every level things would get so expensive people would riot
Indeed. The carbon tax would have to be implemented gradually so that the market can adapt. We should have started doing this 20-30 years ago, unfortunately we're out of time and humanity will have to make some very drastic and difficult decisions.
Climate scientists have long feared being called alarmist, and indeed - the preliminary evidence is that this may have led to over-conservative estimates of the impacts and timescale of the climate disaster.
You don't want to know about the results discussed at conferences where there doesn't have to be consensus on how bad it is/could be.. the IPCC reports are quite optimistic.
IIRC that project was ultimately a failure. The plankton didn't sink to the bottom as expected, instead they were eaten by fish and failed to sequester much carbon.
Because absent a near halt on CO2 emissions they are worthless. We will keep emitting past the point where they are useful and will have a much steeper cliff to fall off. If you have ever seen Futurama's "Crime of the Hot", think of dropping the increasingly large ice cube as the analogy.
If we solve emissions, then I think everyone agrees we can look at accelerated weathering and other sequestration strategies.
There's also the option to spray sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, similar to volcanic eruptions. I think the main problem is that the effects are hard to predict, so you really only want to do it as a last resort.
If we fail to restrict our release of greenhouse gases and CO2 sequestration doesn't get economical and funded in a sensible way, our best option is probably solar shades in low earth orbit (giant sheets of ultra thin foil). It's more expensive than dumping iron in the oceans or sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, but it's predictable and easy to undo.
> our best option is probably solar shades in low earth orbit (giant sheets of ultra thin foil)
A thin reflective foil would not stay in a stable orbit because of solar radiation pressure. Instead, you can put it near the L1 Langrange point but slightly more sunward to compensate for that pressure.
agree - but, its not very constructive to put coal on a global average.. Certain economies are really changing, and other economies really are not. There has to be some constructive way forward that engages this...
Environmentalists are against technical solutions to climate change because people wouldn't learn anything. They need to experience the effects of their actions so they learn from it. Otherwise they'd just expect technology to save them every time they cause a disaster.
I mean, I suppose that's part of it, but the biggest reason (if by "technical solutions" you're talking about geoengineering) is that it's pants on fire crazy to run uncontrolled global scale geoengineering experiments. Unfortunately it's looking more and more likely that we'll be left with little choice.
Not only is it pants on fire crazy. Most options will almost certainly NOT work. Sequestration, iron seeding, accelerated weathering, and sulfur areosols all suffer from huge scale issues that no one has a serious answer for. I can't keep up with all the crazy ideas, "cloud brightening?", launching 100 MM nanosatellites to dim the sun?, but none of these can scale to the problem. LUCKY FOR US, the problem can be fixed by dramatically lowering emissions. We shall see if we actually come together in time.
US congress is funding sulfur aerosol as well as sea salt cloud seeding research, from what I heard with experiments. I feel that even nobody in the community thinks it's a good idea we're getting kind of desperate since so many politicians are asleep at the wheel.
Arguably, we should rule out solar radiation management - in the models you get the weirdest side effects, for example if you ramp up amount of stratospheric sulfur aerosol to the maximum effect (which doesn't even cover all of the warming we have already committed to btw), the jetstream collapses. Do you want to be the one to run that test for real? Also, they only combat a part of the problem, eg sea acidification is untouched. (Still, there is coffee talk about a sulfur test from the US soon.. the person they have in mind doesn't seem too stoked though. Not sure what the state is.)
Carbon sequestration appears feasible. Options include increased biomass (limited effect and needs protection forever), direct removal (how to store safely and longterm?) and enhanced weathering. All of those cost more per ton of carbon in both energy and price compared to not burning fossil fuels. Techniques don't really exist yet to be deployed at scale either, plus the energy needs to come from somewhere.
However, if you have a look at the 1.5°C IPCC report, all the pathways given there assume some kind of carbon capture. The most optimistic one just needs trees, the business-as-usual one needs a massive effort of capturing about half of our yearly emissions starting in 10 years. (!) [0]
I think the human mind has difficulty understanding the scale of the problem. Carbon capture cannot work. A ton of coal releases way more than its weight in CO2 when combusted. Same (but a little better at the margin) for oil and Nat Gas.
We are talking about GIGATONS a year of CO2 that needs to be captured and put somewhere. For every mountain top that is removed, we would have to figure out where to put three more mountains. Not going to happen.
iron seeding can increase amount of cyanobacteria which recently have been identified as potentially being methanogenic, thus this might not be a good idea. Unintended side effects of most geoengineering solutions are a big problem - some things like marine cloud brightening might be a bit less risky though. The other big issue is that most of those measures are just a bandaid which offsets a fixed amount of CO2, so it counter acts a few years of emissions but then you can't scale it up anymore. Adding Sulfur to the atmosphere for example can have a cooling effect but alongside other bad effects like acid rain, there are also studies showing that after a certain amount of sulfur, it does not provide a lot of negative forcing anymore.
Feels a bit like logging into the production server to edit the code there. Maybe it'll come to that, but... might be nice to address some of the root cause issues.
Because we've already conducted one grand experiment with planet-scale climate modification, inadvertently. You'd have to have a very high degree of confidence that the "cure" won't make things a lot worse.
And that's without even getting into the question of who'll pay for it. The countries most affected by climate change - tropical, developing - are least able to pay for it.
Yes, it had the predicted effects in terms of plankton growth and the rest of the food chain. It did take a lot of CO2 out of the air. However, some of the animal life fell into the deep ocean and slowly decayed--releasing methane. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Lots of fish but no climate benefit.
I’d need a source for this, because this seems incorrect. Most of the captured carbon would enter a food cycle, and while some of it might become methane, much more of it would be constantly cycled in the ecosystem, and some would end up as calcium carbonate.
If you want more, current scientific analyses and surveys of CC literature/papers/talks/conferences, I would look at Dr. Paul Beckwith's channel on YT.
With the rapidly declining costs of getting payloads to outerspace, I think we should discuss blocking radiation from the sun in some way. We clearly are not going to transition our entire energy system fast enough, but using mirrors/reflectors is a reversible and reasonable way to slow the warming of the planet.
Let's say we take rockets from SpaceX out to 2050: wouldn't that be ample time for cost declines to make trillions of small mirrors possible?
This might help contain temperature changes, but it won't prevent ocean acidification due to rising CO2 levels. I'm curious what percent of the damage is done by CO2 levels vs directly by temperature.
The earth is kinda big. The sun strikes over 49,000,000 square miles at any given moment. A solid surface shade blocking 1% would need to be nearly half a million square miles if we could hold it in place like at lagrange 1. If we could launch a fuel that burns into a gas that can effectively block/reflect light that reduces the mass to about 250 sq. miles of fuel times whatever is the necessary density of the gas cloud.
Even if it was actually feasible to regulate how much sun the Earth gets you'd have to consider these points:
1) Climate lag. There are some 40 years of lag between emissions and changes to the climate. Even if stopped all human emissions today temperatures would keep rising for 40 years.
2) Climate feedbacks. There are a number of systems (methane, arctic ice, etc) that will keep altering the climate even if we stopped all emissions today.
The next 100 or so years are going to be rough no matter what humanity does.
If you run the numbers you'll see that this is not a viable option. It's too expensive to get enough payload in space, the earth can't afford it.
I mean if you're making mirrors, why do we need to put them in space at great cost? Just put them on earth. The cost of the actual mirrors is basically zero compared to to the cost of putting that mirror in orbit. The earth mirrors might be slightly less efficient but you can just make up for that with more mirrors.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions here, but I'd like to discuss this a little more if that's ok with you.
> It's too expensive to get enough payload in space
Full disclosure: I'm a pretty big SpaceX fan.
At first glance, SpaceX is currently charging about $1000USD/kg to LEO. It's widely believed that SpaceX's internal cost is a fairly small fraction of that; let's assume it's $500USD/kg to LEO.
The Big One will be Starship + Superheavy, assuming it flies. That stack will be entirely reusable, so its base cost (ignoring build amortization of the build) will be fuel + operational expenses.
Musk said that he hopes that Starship + Superheavy will be able to deliver 120 metric tons to low earth orbit for 4x the price of a 747 flight, or about $2 million USD, which yields a cost of less than $20USD/kg to LEO.
A lot of speculation there, and $20/kg is still a lot more expensive than mirrors on the ground...maybe. How much more effective would mirrors be stationed at Lagrange Point 1?
I suspect your overall conclusion is correct though.
It is because the flow of money that powers climate research, green industry, and climate activism is largely dependent on stirring up fear in the public to garner acceptance and support. Climate change is a real problem but so are the perverse incentives in our research institutions.
They are lying, they have been inventing doomsday scenario narratives for decades. I'm in my 40s and the lying started in my elementary school. They haven't changed the approach that much in all these years, I can clearly recognize the same lies from when I was 10 years old being peddled once again today.
In the 1970s, they used to show us films in school about how the world was going to run out of fresh water in ten years. It's a message I still remember.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadThe paperclip maximizers are here and they will turn the entire surface of the earth into plastic wrap and data centers. Choose to dedicate the productive capacity of your life to something else.
I've been working in the nonprofit space for 10 years and trust me when I say that we need highly capable and motivated tech professionals. Go here and start looking at job postings in your country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_organiza...
No one person will solve a planet-scale issue like climate change, but each person who decides to pick up a bucket and start bailing water will mitigate the impact. Be the change.
You need highly talented professionals, to do things like geoengineering, you say? You mean those aircraft that fly constantly over my farm spraying who knows what toxic compounds into the air, in order to alter the climate, while calling me a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist simply for noticing this? You need me to help you with your schemes?
Yeah, that's a firm no.
* Climatescape: https://climatescape.org/
* Climate.Careers: https://climate.careers/
(Disclaimer: I know the people who created both of those, so I guess I'm biased as to their quality, but I really do think they're very valuable resources.)
There are also some great Slack groups for technologists who are worried about climate change:
* https://climateaction.tech/
* https://techimpactmakers.com/
I'm also part of the Sunrise Movement[0], which has significantly pushed US politics in the direction of actually doing something about about climate change. I'm working on various software projects for them, and would love to help anyone who's interested get involved in that. Feel free to email me -- my email's in my profile.
[0] https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
I don't see a path to doing that full time, though.
Until recently I considered the "clathrate gun" to be an extermination event. The earth hasn't had those level of CO2 and methane (in the air) since the Eocene (~2000 CO2 ppm). It's hard to imagine industry and agriculture functioning in that context.
But perhaps humans are more resilient. There's growing evidence validating the Young Dryas theory, where the global temps plunged and then spiked 1000 years later. Somehow humans survived, even though our fledgeling civilization was reset.
Not to mention our brains. Cognitive ability declines significantly as CO2 concentration rises.
Not that 401ks will mean much if society collapses...
That doesn't make sense. Even if Earth gets completely fubar, there's NO WAY IN HELL that it's going to easier to move to Mars. Mars is waaaaay harder to 'fix' than earth and this is not going to change in many thousands of years.
Bezos sees that, though. He's a big fan of O'Neill cylinders and similar. It's Musk who wants to go try and get us to live on Mars.
But... I was asked about the far larger and far worse fires Australia had in 1974-1975, and why those were related just to mismanagement and these are related to climate change. I didn't have an answer, does anyone?
Because of the trend towards increased frequency. "100 year events" (fire, flood, heatwave, storms) are now happening every year.
Alright, that is incorrect. Perhaps you're living in age of better reporting and global information exchange?
Anywhere I could look up and see what the global degree increase was in the 1970s? I imagine this might be hard to find because they thought largely that the climate was cooling then, no?
edit: why downvotes? I'm agreeing!
One of my favorite graphs on the subject remains xkcd's: https://xkcd.com/1732/
You can't read an exact "degree increase" around the 70s on that chart, but you can clearly see the seventies is in a notable slope/gradient as is everything post-world wars.
edit: Obviously not "damage is done" let's not care, but rather, how little emissions started the slope change.
Isn't it amazing how little CO2 from 1800-1900 was released compared to today? But it still kicked off this drastic change in slope?
I'm very skeptical would could in our best efforts globally get down to 1900 levels just given how many more people there are, and they need to eat.
Certainly, we are in trouble if our goal is to somehow get back to pre-1800 temperature levels. Which is why the goal setting has always "merely" been to try stop the current slope from so dangerously remaining exponential, and has never been about entirely undoing the effects of man-made climate change. As a species, we can try solve that after we've done what we can about the present problems of that sharp forecasted curve.
Wildfires need an accumulation of fuel. Climate change could produce the fuel, but that would be a process of decades. Indeed, bad fires in 1975 -- 45 years later there is enough fuel.
Which would mean that the mechanism would be: climate change -> growth of fuel -> burn.
The thing is that most of our current action plan for climate change consists of reducing CO2 emissions, and this is woefully inadequate for a world that the most recent science indicates has already passed the tipping point. Among the second-order changes that we should be preparing for:
1. Migration as the new norm. A 4-5C temperature rise will shift equivalent biomes over 1000 miles northward/southward, and inundate large coastal areas where major populations are currently located. Major densely-populated areas will become uninhabitable, and currently uninhabitable areas will become fertile.
2. The collapse of governments, and of the nation-state system. When migration becomes the new norm, borders become irrelevant, as do settled homogenous populations. What's the new political organization look like?
3. Large temporary food shortages. Higher temperatures, higher rainfall, and higher CO2 levels actually mean that in the long-term, plant growth and agricultural productivity will increase, and the earth's carrying capacity should go up. But in the short term - a lot of our current crops are hyper-specialized to their existing climate, and land rights, water rights, & physical crop location become problematic. Food distribution becomes critical - we'll likely make enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but the people who grow it may not want to share (or may have the inability to trade) with the people who need it.
4. Expect to see more diseases emerge. Large migrations, changes in biomes, and increased human habitation of formerly virgin ecosystems all spell chances for pathogens to jump from animal hosts to people and spread widely.
Overall, I'm a lot more scared of the likelihood that humans will kill each other than that the environment will kill us. We have a unique tendency to blame each other for unwelcome changes rather than to adapt to them.
The collective freakout in the USA over the migrant "caravan" really cemented this point for me. It's like... jeez people, do you have any idea what we're in for in the next few decades?
It's a really good time to start building the capacity to effectively and ethically handle big influxes of people (which works out demographically for the US anyway, as the birth rate drops). Unfortunately, we seem to be doing the exact opposite.
The reporting on it was designed to cause a freakout, timed to coincide with elections.
The problem with that is, that one of the bases of Capitalism is the maintenance of SCARCITY. That is, it's necessary to put most people in a situation of want, of low availability of resources, products, services - so that they have no choice but to work for capital-owners (= owners of commercial companies) to make a living. But to provide a decent life for a lot of incoming people means that there has to be an available glut of a lot of stuff.
Seems like the most sensible option for me.
There’s already ample literature proving the tremendous impact of cloud cover on global temperatures.
I'm pretty wary of geoengineering, just because we don't really know the second/third/nth-order effects geoengineering solutions might have. I'm not saying it should never be done, but I think much more research is in order before doing something that literally affects the entire planet.
[0] I believe I learned that from this book (which I thought was excellent), although I'm not 100% sure: https://www.amazon.com/This-Changes-Everything-Capitalism-Cl...
For more info check out this project:
https://projectvesta.org
On the contrary, citizens become more nationalistic. The pendulum will swing right again. EU falling apart already due to it.
This is already happening as well: while the hinterlands of Britain voted for Brexit, it was widely unpopular in London, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and other regions, and may lead to the breakup of the UK. I could easily see a future where cities declare their independence and then organize a loose global confederation of free-trade agreements and mutual assistance pacts, leaving behind rump states ruling over the rural areas of what used to be their country. Then add in private corporations (incubated within the cities) to provide physical security for travelers and migrants who pay for the service.
However, the model of the Hanseatic cities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
may be something that certain cities or city-regions could theoretically try to set up.
Other than that, agreed. I'm very worried popular movements will not be strong enough to prevent the emergence of authoritarian regimes who try to keep the migrating masses out with extreme violence (a more extreme version of how Europe has been trying to stop the flow of immigrants from Syria and Libya).
It would be close to impossible to feed 8B people in a +4C world. Probably even in a +2C world.
Enjoy the party while it lasts.
If you look at the wildfires in Russia from 2010 which helped trigger the Arab revolutions in 2011 it should give you an idea. That occurred 10 years ago when we weren't even at +1C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires#Role_in...
Also:
> Rockström [director of the Potsdam institute] doesn’t like our chances. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that,” he says. “There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/climate-...
Just FYI that all the links in this are dead apart from one that links to a youtube channel called "Russia Good"
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzFHWLAMQ2hWPc7fbssfSUg/abo...
Any better sources on this?
Might as well have faith in Jesus at this point, if you're just going to pray to non-existant future tech.
E.g. I think a lot people have prayed for a solution to solve problems like aging, but several millennia of civilization, and we're still aging and dying.
We already have the capability to solve it (we created it), it's just not profitable enough to start trying yet. Or at least it will be unfathomably more profitable when people are faced with life or death situations.
We’ve gotten so used to not paying for the externalities associated with emissions it’s damn near impossible to shift gears. Even at the individual level people are often only willing to do it when the cost increase is marginal.
If we taxed emissions at every level things would get so expensive people would riot.
I think we just have to accept that our society is not designed in a way that we can deal with this. We will have to let the catastrophe happen before there will be any real change. Even then their may not be change. We just have to wait for enough people to die for the system to fall back into balance.
Your observations, calculus, and conclusions are correct.
I'd only suggest that we're already paying for those externalities. It's just that those costs are off book. So the feedback loops are broken. Making improvements all but impossible.
A carbon tax would update our accounting rules to capture those costs in a direct and efficient manner.
If we were serious about this there would be hundreds or thousands of companies competing on the most cost effective way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. All companies would be required to buy enough carbon removal to make them zero net emissions. When you buy a gallon of gas it would have whatever the current market value of 5.5lbs of carbon removal factored in right at the pump. Or that would happen at the refinery and be reflected in the final price of the gas.
Unfortunately if you wanted to jump start this market it would be very disruptive to the global economy. Governments worldwide (it's too easy to export pollution, this needs to be a worldwide solution) would have to agree on a very high price to get the market started to avoid undercutting companies wanting to get into it and let the money start forming a pile so terrifically large that people would be scrambling to develop carbon capture technologies faster and cheaper than the competition. There would be a lot of cheating and lying that would need to be policed worldwide. Our current system of governments is not capable of pulling this off.
Carbon markets are something people try to entice capitalists with, but only because they don't think people will look at the details. To actually implement them would send those same capitalists howling and screaming to their nearest governmental body with exceptions and rollbacks in hand.
This type of thing works, when done right.
The point of the market is that it provides political pressure from companies on both ends so it is insulated from political whims, at least to some degree. If some company wants to grease their local politicians to get exceptions or have the price set low they get pushback from other companies that want to redeem those credits at full price.
We'll likely need to do sequestration but, assuming a gradually rising carbon price, it won't make economic sense to do it at scale until we've done the more cost effective things first.
Interesting idea. This reminds me of the "Future Cost Function" used in my country to decide the marginal cost of another MWh of hydroelectric generation. Since this country generates over half of its power from hydroelectricity, and the amount of rain varies seasonally (and also depends on the conditions of both the Pacific and the Atlantic), there's always the question: should we use more of the water from the dams, or should we save the water for later and use the thermal generators instead? If we use too much water, and the next rainy season doesn't rain enough, the reservoirs could run dry (which is really bad, since we don't have enough thermal generators); if we save too much water, we're wasting money on expensive fuel (and in the worst case, the reservoirs could get full and have to throw away the excess water, without having the chance to use it to generate electricity). The "Future Cost Function" model simulates the future cost of the thermal generation for several scenarios, to arrive at a cost for the water which minimizes the total cost (given that less costly generators are dispatched first, so a higher cost for the water means more and more costly thermal generators will be dispatched).
What you propose seems similar: you are suggesting to use something we can easily measure (the cost of removing one ton of CO2 from the air) to decide a price for something which would appear to have a zero price otherwise (the cost of emitting one ton of CO2 into the air). I would go even further, given the similarities with what I described above, and somehow put a "target concentration" in the formula, so that initially the cost is higher (to fund removal for the extra CO2 which is already there) and automatically winds down to near zero if the concentration gets near the target (or even overshoots it).
Indeed. The carbon tax would have to be implemented gradually so that the market can adapt. We should have started doing this 20-30 years ago, unfortunately we're out of time and humanity will have to make some very drastic and difficult decisions.
Because they have been using outdated models and ignoring feedbacks.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/new-climate-models-p...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
If we solve emissions, then I think everyone agrees we can look at accelerated weathering and other sequestration strategies.
If we fail to restrict our release of greenhouse gases and CO2 sequestration doesn't get economical and funded in a sensible way, our best option is probably solar shades in low earth orbit (giant sheets of ultra thin foil). It's more expensive than dumping iron in the oceans or sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, but it's predictable and easy to undo.
A thin reflective foil would not stay in a stable orbit because of solar radiation pressure. Instead, you can put it near the L1 Langrange point but slightly more sunward to compensate for that pressure.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4550401/
40% of the worlds electricity is generated using coal.
If we changed this 10 years ago, we’d have less problems today.
If we change this today we’ll have less of a problem in 10 years.
We’re coming up with all kinds of clever ideas to deal with the problem in 2050. This is a slow train wreck happening over decades.
Because enough people make a LOT of money from the status quo
I mean, I suppose that's part of it, but the biggest reason (if by "technical solutions" you're talking about geoengineering) is that it's pants on fire crazy to run uncontrolled global scale geoengineering experiments. Unfortunately it's looking more and more likely that we'll be left with little choice.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/us-geoengineering-re...
Arguably, we should rule out solar radiation management - in the models you get the weirdest side effects, for example if you ramp up amount of stratospheric sulfur aerosol to the maximum effect (which doesn't even cover all of the warming we have already committed to btw), the jetstream collapses. Do you want to be the one to run that test for real? Also, they only combat a part of the problem, eg sea acidification is untouched. (Still, there is coffee talk about a sulfur test from the US soon.. the person they have in mind doesn't seem too stoked though. Not sure what the state is.)
Carbon sequestration appears feasible. Options include increased biomass (limited effect and needs protection forever), direct removal (how to store safely and longterm?) and enhanced weathering. All of those cost more per ton of carbon in both energy and price compared to not burning fossil fuels. Techniques don't really exist yet to be deployed at scale either, plus the energy needs to come from somewhere.
However, if you have a look at the 1.5°C IPCC report, all the pathways given there assume some kind of carbon capture. The most optimistic one just needs trees, the business-as-usual one needs a massive effort of capturing about half of our yearly emissions starting in 10 years. (!) [0]
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...
edit: By the way, we have enough fossil fuels in the ground to reach 5000 ppm of CO2. At 1000 ppm humans already have measurable cognitive decline.
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
We are talking about GIGATONS a year of CO2 that needs to be captured and put somewhere. For every mountain top that is removed, we would have to figure out where to put three more mountains. Not going to happen.
And that's without even getting into the question of who'll pay for it. The countries most affected by climate change - tropical, developing - are least able to pay for it.
Yes, it had the predicted effects in terms of plankton growth and the rest of the food chain. It did take a lot of CO2 out of the air. However, some of the animal life fell into the deep ocean and slowly decayed--releasing methane. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Lots of fish but no climate benefit.
If you want more, current scientific analyses and surveys of CC literature/papers/talks/conferences, I would look at Dr. Paul Beckwith's channel on YT.
Let's say we take rockets from SpaceX out to 2050: wouldn't that be ample time for cost declines to make trillions of small mirrors possible?
1) Climate lag. There are some 40 years of lag between emissions and changes to the climate. Even if stopped all human emissions today temperatures would keep rising for 40 years.
2) Climate feedbacks. There are a number of systems (methane, arctic ice, etc) that will keep altering the climate even if we stopped all emissions today.
The next 100 or so years are going to be rough no matter what humanity does.
I mean if you're making mirrors, why do we need to put them in space at great cost? Just put them on earth. The cost of the actual mirrors is basically zero compared to to the cost of putting that mirror in orbit. The earth mirrors might be slightly less efficient but you can just make up for that with more mirrors.
> It's too expensive to get enough payload in space
Full disclosure: I'm a pretty big SpaceX fan.
At first glance, SpaceX is currently charging about $1000USD/kg to LEO. It's widely believed that SpaceX's internal cost is a fairly small fraction of that; let's assume it's $500USD/kg to LEO.
The Big One will be Starship + Superheavy, assuming it flies. That stack will be entirely reusable, so its base cost (ignoring build amortization of the build) will be fuel + operational expenses.
Musk said that he hopes that Starship + Superheavy will be able to deliver 120 metric tons to low earth orbit for 4x the price of a 747 flight, or about $2 million USD, which yields a cost of less than $20USD/kg to LEO.
A lot of speculation there, and $20/kg is still a lot more expensive than mirrors on the ground...maybe. How much more effective would mirrors be stationed at Lagrange Point 1?
I suspect your overall conclusion is correct though.
Worse Than Expected™