"Net-zero" seems like a major setback, just as it was when the term "global warming" that people understood got replaced with "climate change" which is much muddier.
If the goal is "stop burning fossil fuels" there is a large precedent of non-fossil power sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectic, nuclear, etc. Real progress is happening on electric cars. One thing that all of these have in common is that they produce a wanted product: they might be expensive or they might be intermittently available but you spend money to get something you want.
"Net-zero" includes the use of systems that capture carbon directly out of the air, either all mechanical or with plants part of the system. These systems basically don't exist. I mean, there are a handful of prototype systems but there is no trend to scaling them up. The most common form of CO2 "disposal" is to inject it into an old oil well to get more oil. A large carbon capture (from the output of a power plant) system in Texas was recently shut down because they shut down the oil field.
All of those systems need somebody to spend money for a product they don't want to meet an externally imposed requirement. It's going to be very hard to put a system in place to move the money around because of the perception (and reality) that anything that concentrates money in one place is going to be a nexus of corruption.
> "Net-zero" includes the use of systems that capture carbon directly out of the air, either all mechanical or with plants part of the system.
"Plants" are very inefficient at CO2 capture. Most of the CO2 captured in Earth (by anthropogenic action or just by natural causes) is by algae/bacteria action.
> If the goal is "stop burning fossil fuels" there is a large precedent of non-fossil power sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectic, nuclear, etc.
> All of those systems need somebody to spend money for a product they don't want to meet an externally imposed requirement. It's going to be very hard to put a system in place to move the money around because of the perception (and reality) that anything that concentrates money in one place is going to be a nexus of corruption.
If a conflict in Europe happening right now isn't a good enough incentive to make Europe immediately carbon-free, not much really is.
The conflict is not going to make Europe carbon-free, it's going to reverse the trend on emissions and make Europe emit more carbon.
Renewables alone cannot power the grid. You need something dispatchable for that, or the grid will fail the first time there is a night with low wind. All electricity storage in Europe is a rounding error, and will remain one for at least a decade, no matter what is done. The dispatchable power used to back up wind and solar in Europe is traditionally gas, of which much is Russian.
The rapid need to decouple energy needs from Russia is causing European operators to spin coal plants back up, and even build new ones.
In the ideal form of net-zero, the direct air capture of CO2 is only needed to offset the hard to abate emissions—ie. jet fuel, global shipping, embodied carbon (like concrete). That future is dependent on wide scale decarbonization (in progress, albeit slowly) and, as you mention, an externally imposed requirement—from either governments or consumers.
However, that period of net-zero should be a waypoint on the path to sequestering historical carbon (the real goal) but the only way to get there is to first decarbonize everything that we can.
In a way, carbon credits/offsets might actually be a deterrent to that future. There is a notion of a “circular carbon economy” where CO2 is made into useful products in addition to sequestering for carbon credits, but you are right that the dominate use case for captured CO2 is enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Put to that end, there are very few practical long term benefits to sequestering carbon.
That said, one benefit of offsets, tax credits, etc. is funding the creation of the carbon dioxide removal technology we will need by 2050 to offset the hard to abate emissions, but that tech is only useful if we first decarbonize as it hard to imagine it can be scaled up to the 40 gigaton level based on the data today.
So, we only need to do incredibly inefficient atmospheric capture of a one per two thousand part gas at a planet-wide scale with technology that nobody uses in production, with economic incentives that will somehow arise, in a world where gas prices going up 15% causes governments to fall.
It is a very steep climb and nearly impossible given the status quo, and it's easy to get discouraged, so I understand your sarcasm.
I've spent the past few months studying up on the state of the carbon removal world, and I was encouraged by a couple technologies (there is a lot of cool stuff out there, but there are some which seem more practical than others), which are in the "carbon utilization" bucket—appealing because the CO2 is turned into something with value rather than an abstract credit.
1) using captured carbon to create concrete aggregates as well as in the curing of concrete can make for a stronger material, a carbon sink, and doesn't require much change in behavior
2) turning captured CO2 into carbon fiber more cheaply than the current process could have knock on climate benefits if carbon fiber becomes cheap enough that it enjoys widespread use.
I hope the circular carbon economy pans out because it has the power to stimulate minds. Making something of value out of the air is very "sci fi" and doesn't really ask as much from the populous at large in terms of understanding a pretty complex issue like carbon sequestering.
> just as it was when the term "global warming" that people understood got replaced with "climate change" which is much muddier.
If by muddier you mean accurate then yes.
We also replaced Newtonian physics with the much "muddier" theory of relativity.
> money ... money ... money ... money
Well that might be the problem, money won't do shit when 2B people will flee to the north. "We can't do X because my stack of magic paper with numbers on it will be smaller if we do so"
Also, "global warming" could be considered a good thing by many people. I mean, who likes cold weather? So we went from positive term, to neutral, and I guess we shift to some negative one next.
> just as it was when the term "global warming" that people understood got replaced with "climate change" which is much muddier.
For the record the "climate change" phrasing is attributed to republican consultant Frank Luntz and pushed by the Bush administration allegedly as a way to make it sound less frightening. [0]
Some climate organizations are correctly using the expression "climate emergency" which is more apt given the current circunstances.
As a sidenote "Carbon footprint" was also a concept fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers. [1]
Right, politicians can say things like "the climate is changing all the time" to buy another 20 years of inaction.
Now we are seeing big "net-zero" promises 30 or 40 years down the road, what's mostly likely is that in 15 years there is another big fad for taking action in 50 or 60 years.
>For the record the "climate change" phrasing is attributed to republican consultant Frank Luntz and pushed by the Bush administration allegedly as a way to make it sound less frightening. [0]
>Some climate organizations are correctly using the expression "climate emergency" which is more apt given the current circunstances.
Isn't this the same thing as "climate change", but in the opposite direction?
CO2 emissions are still rising. We are currently cheering and celebrating reductions... in acceleration.
Feedback loops like methane emissions due to permafrost melting are still gonna hit us even if we all went into caveman lifestyles right now. That means that we go into a positive feedback loop where temperature keeps raising irrespective of our actions.
There are already densely populated regions getting close to 'wet bulb temperatures' which means they won't be able to sustain life much longer.
There are regions that have no readiness for floods or draughts or cyclones who will now face them.
The problem is that "emergency" is fundamentally a loaded phrase, and once you establish a precedent of using loaded phrases when it's "justified", everyone (including your opponents) will start using it. After all, everything is "justified" to the activists petitioning for it. The end result is that every issue gets "emergency" slapped to the end of it, and the phrase becomes meaningless.
I can't read the article due to the paywall but when I read the IPCC reports, the net-zero pathway for <2C required basically ceasing all fossil fuel consumption within a very short period of time (for <1.5C it was practically instantly).
I have seen no credible plan for how we would actually do this. Especially given we haven't even managed to stop (or greatly slow) the growth of global emissions much less reduce them to zero.
People like to get optimistic about accounting tricks, we're in the Eron reality when it comes to climate change.
The Keeling curve shows that not only is atmospheric CO2 increasing, but the rate it is increasing is also increasing. The difference between the Keeling curve and all other measures of industrial pollution is that the CO2 in the atmosphere can be directly measured, everything else has to be estimated based on reported figures.
It doesn't matter how clever you are in accounting, the atmosphere doesn't care if your reported emissions show progress towards climate goals.
The rate of increase in emissions slowing down means that the third derivative of atmospheric carbon is negative. Your chart shows that the second derivative of atmospheric carbon is negative. Both these observations are consistent with each other.
The highest year-over-year increase in CO2 concentration was 2016-2017, and it's been on a downward trend since. The 2020-2021 increase was 30% smaller than the peak. That's still a lot, about 3X 1970 levels, but if the trend continues at the current rate we should return to 1970 levels in 15 years, and that will be with more than double the world population and 30 times the world GDP.
> I have seen no credible plan for how we would actually do this. Especially given we haven't even managed to stop (or greatly slow) the growth of global emissions much less reduce them to zero.
Given the distribution of responsibilities, and the societal emphasis on specialisation, I think it’s completely unreasonable to expect the people who study the climate phenomena to also define a plan with such radical cultural change implications.
On the one hand, it’s gonna take everyone to make some adjustments. On the other hand “day to day” folk have been making these adjustments for 40years and it’s clear that we need to make bigger ones, faster. The majority of the current suggestions seem to require changes in capital expectation, and extensive supply-chain alterations of the kind where whole sectors of work will need to change. No-one wants to do either because we live in a culture that doesn’t support these kinds of changes.
I'm not saying that the climatologists need to make a plan. But someone does, and so far I haven't seen any credible road map that gets us to net zero quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.
It seems there is no non-radical future - either we face catastrophic climate change or unimaginable changes to our way of life.
I see. Yes, I agree with this. Sadly, the idiots with the capital and power who have been ignoring the research and evidence for half a decade were the ones who should have thought about this. If they had done, we might have made an easier transition.
There's no chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees anymore. Not only are emissions still rising, but the rate of increase is also still accelerating. It's just not a realistic goal.
Imho it will all depend on China and India coming to the party, and considering cheap oil and coal funds their expansion i can't really see that happening any time soon
Catching up to meet some goal no one understands isn't possible. The world will get warmer and warmer until some market/military/survival barrier is reached.
"We need to pass this law so that in 1000 years sea levels will be X" is complete farce.
I'm not saying the science is wrong. I've read the ipcc reports and im convinced of human caused warming. I'm saying being right about the science says almost nothing about what changes need to be made in the world.
Humans dont care about altering the environment to meet our needs. The Holocene Extinction carries on.
We're just here to consume the energy gradient. Nature abhors unused reserves of energy. 2nd law of thermodynamics etc. Something was bound to evolve that would burn up all the fossil fuels buried underground.
You do realise the earth is at the very end of an interglacial period? The purpose of "stopping global warming" is not to stop the earth warming. Stopping warming would be as bad as global warming. Reversing warming would be much worse. We want to slow it, not stop it.
Global warming is the (as usual incredibly well-chosen) name for the rate of increase in temperature going up way too fast. The purpose is to stretch the next 100 years of warming at the current rates to call it 2000 years of warming. To make it take longer. Not to stop it, and not to reverse it. The ideal global warming changes will keep warming the planet, just much slower than is currently happening.
The problem is I'm going to get downvoted for this, as there is an anti-global-warming "theory" that says we're at the start of the next ice age. And like all good lies, it's essentially true. In the next few thousand years an ice age should start. The name global warming, however, means that if possible it'd be nice if all the remaining progress to the next ice age didn't happen in ~200 years.
Can we as a HN community stop downvoting comments because we don't like the reality of what is happening?
I know the reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe is uncomfortable to talk about, but aggressive denial is really a problem in the HN community.
I can completely understand people who haven't studied this topic in depth not being aware of how dire the situation is, so asking questions or debating is healthy and expected. Downvoting a comment consisting of a statement of fact combined with a logical hypothesis derived from that fact, backed up by 3 well known citations is not a healthy direction for this community to develop in.
Denial is a part of dealing with this reality, but as a community we should work a bit harder to move towards better acceptance and understanding.
Very often I disagree with some comment and nevertheless upvote, because that comment is really thoughtful and is an important contribution to the discussion with important subjects or perspectives that need to be considered.
Edit: Sorry about that duplicate. I couldn't see my other comment and thought my phone has failed submitting.
Yes, I totally agree. Often I upvote a comment I disagree with since it nevertheless is a thoughtful and important contribution to the discussion. I feel I learn most from people I disagree with.
I didn't even downvote it, but saying "we are not doing nearly enough, therefore we are doomed" encourages some people to conclude "well, then we can pollute as much as we want, it doesn't matter anyway". Yes, we are on the wrong path, and it's becoming more unrealistic by the day, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still strive towards 2 degrees.
> but saying "we are not doing nearly enough, therefore we are doomed
OP did not write that at all! He only wrote a single sentence, why did you create new text to criticize and attribute it to OP?
I myself keep pointing to the NOAAA page for the CO2 growth rate (https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html) - which is positive and increasing. OP is correct and the parent is too. Even the growth rate still increases, it still keeps getting worse faster! It's unpopular on reddit's /r/de too to say that, with similar justification. As if lying and keeping truth away won't hurt much more because no, people are stupid but not completely.
In addition here in Germany I got so watch from a front seat how the people in the country react when even just a single fossil fuel is cut - and only partially (even for Germany Russia only supplies a part of the gas, even if it's a substantial one). We actually needed to stop regardless of the Russian situation, for climate change alone. Which nobody ever even dares to mention, the public discussion and what politicians have to say is all about "crisis mode". I have not seen a single politician try to reframe it as "we need to do this anyway", it's either about supporting people financially to be able to afford more expensive gas, about who needs to save, or how and where to get other gas faster than 2024 (deal with Katar for LNG).
The head of the state of Saxony warned of "deindustrialization". But we need to cut fossil fuel anyway! Worldwide!
The current crisis should be a chance, but it is only seen, and only framed, as "crisis", to be remedied to get back to full gas storage and fully flowing supplies.
The situation IS this dire! Try significantly reducing usage of fossil fuels in any country. You get riots.
You can plant as many trees and ban plastic straws all you like, the only thing that would make a dent is a significant reduction in removing any more fossil fuels of any kind from below ground to feed it into the above ground carbon cycle. And it is truth that it looks really really bad. That would just limit the growth rate, it still would do nothing towards actually lowering atmospheric CO2.
It's called paraphrasing (and yes, dramatization to make a point).
From the comment I replied to:
>reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe
>how dire the situation is
I read this as "doomed". And if we are already doomed and nothing can be done about it, shouldn't we eat as much meat and take as many flights as we want? This is how a lot of people think when they read stuff like this, and honestly, they have a point. Either it's unavoidable and dire OR we can do something about it (by limiting emissions). So why ask people to make sacrifices and then also tell them we are doomed anyway?
If it is unavoidable than the question becomes how do we build to handle it instead of how do we prevent it - the first question may involve much more carbon output during the building phase, for example.
Please have a more charitable interpretation of comments here. Even if some event (like climate change, a hurricane, etc.) is bound to occur that doesn't mean there is nothing that can be done to mitigate damage or impact
I think the problem we're having talking to each other is you think an unavoidable climate catastrophe is "doomed", and I think "doomed" is more like the complete extinction of the human race, which is definitely still fixable, from what I know.
There are degrees of how doomed we will be, depending on what we do. That's why "paraphrasing" using words like "doomed" that imply something binary are really unhelpful. There's still a vast difference between a +2.5° and a +4° world.
> ... encourages some people to conclude "well, then we can pollute as much as we want, it doesn't matter anyway"
I hold "contrary" opinions on the climate debate, but I don't take these kinds of articles the way that you noted at all. I see it simply as an opportunity to change tactics.
Denying the scientific reality in the name of 'beneficial climate messaging' is just as bad as doing it in the name of 'beneficial fossil fuel messaging'. The so-called 'tipping point' has come and gone and now the planet is committed to steady long-term warming. Eliminating fossil fuel use would not result in not reaching 2 degrees (which is a global average, so the poles would be significantly warmer by tens of degrees) - even this paper doesn't claim that, they merely note that it might be pushed back some decades past 2100.
Warming is unavoidable so major expenditure on whatever adaptations are possible is just as necessary as getting off fossil fuels, and ignoring that reality will set many areas up for long-term disasters in the near future.
Another uncomfortable reality is that politicians in all fossil-fuel producing nations may give lip service to climate concerns, but in reality none of them are going to try to shut down the most profitable economic activity in their countries. That's what the record shows in the USA as well.
This was my thought as well. There have been several comments in this thread (and others like it recently) where the content of the comment was:
- A thoughtful, non-flippant response and sometimes included citations
- In disagreement with the article/other comments
- Downvoted almost instantly
I personally enjoy reading many of this community's comments, thoughts, and ideas, especially when someone has taken the time to write out a thoughtful response, and even if I may not agree with the conclusion. I really hope others do, as well.
Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today, there's climate lag and feedbacks. Temps would keep rising for decades if not centuries.
In fact if you look at the source for that graph [1] you'll see it's a paper from 2009 and they used old 2007 IPCC data for their models.
The IPCC has not taken feedbacks into account until their sixth report of which the synthesis hasn't been published yet [2].
In 2009 feedbacks were still not well understood. In fact Natalia Shakhova didn't publish her seminal paper on methane in the Arctic until 2010. Here's an interview with her in 2013:
I'm not a scientist but I've been reading about climate change for some years now.
Maybe I'm missing something but here's my pedestrian view on it.
The thing that bugs me the most is the article almost completely ignores the role of feedbacks. This has been the classic IPCC position (which AFAIK they've rectified for their sixth assessment).
The article only mentions this right at the end:
"If, however, zero emissions were to occur later in the century, there is the potential to lock in more carbon-cycle feedback processes – such as melting permafrost – than under current global temperature levels."
Quite a strange comment considering the permafrost has been melting for decades. See the Natalia Shakhova video I shared on my earlier comment. A quick google search will tell you more about the methane feedback.
And there are other feedbacks already triggered like the Arctic ice melting. Arctic ice deflects sunlight and has been decreasing yearly since we started measuring it in the 70s IIRC. See the latest data from the PIOMAS project:
The article also makes some bizarre claims such as "If emissions are cut to zero, on the other hand, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would quickly fall, before eventually stabilising at a lower level.". But according to NASA, CO2 remains in the atmosphere between 300 and 1000 years.
Then "as the oceans slowly warmed up to reach the same temperature as the atmosphere". The oceans absorb more heat than the atmosphere which is the released over the following decades in a phenomenon sometimes called climate lag.
Is that under "realistic" economical assumptions? I.e. phasing out fossil fuel while keeping our political system and economy reasonably intact? Or is it even impossible if we stop emitting all CO2 tomorrow, because the warming is lagging behind?
Last I heard, we could still physically achive 1.5 degrees, but we would have to switch completely to command economy immediately and take a big reduction in economic activity (a couple times larger than during the peak of COVID). Which I believe is still better than the alternative.
Economic depression in much of the world will see a return to deforestation as people are forced to use wood for heating, cooking and clearing land for more subsitence farming. I think the extent of the "command" portion of the command economy itself is unrealistic.
Command economy isn't going to help if they command it to "keep burning fossil fuels".
Which is the main flaw that the current economic model has regarding climate change, paying people to do the thing we don't want them to do.
> Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion or 6.8 percent of GDP in 2020 and are expected to increase to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025 as the share of ...
> Is that under "realistic" economical assumptions?
It would be with nuclear. But the nutters won round 1, which makes 2º virtually assured.
> we would have to switch completely to command economy
Command economies centralize political power. Broadly speaking, modern elites are insulated from everything but total societal collapse, which any country able to re-organise into a command economy is unlikely to face. One would expect a centralized political structure to give fewer shits about the environment, not more.
> try to pin climate chamge on envirenmentalists over nuclear power
Unbuilt plants don't emit carbon. But without nuclear power there was no realistic path to curtailing emissions. Populations won't peacefully accept a reduction in their quality of life. Cutting use is and always was a pipe dream.
When we needed to pivot, in the 80s and 90s, solar and batteries were not yet competitive. They now are. But that's thanks to fundamental breakthroughs in basic research. At this point, ramping up supply chains and industry will take too long for them to forestall 2º. (As was predictable ex ante.) Nuclear + gas would have gotten us to below 2º while easing the transition to wind + solar. Apart from nuclear for baseload at scale, we have coal. It's no shock that everyone who busted their nukes is now burning coal (or importing coal-shaken electrons).
So no, I don't think we can pin blame on the anti-nuke greens. They didn't cause the problem. But they blocked nukes (and in America, gas pipelines) that presented the most realistic path to a future now no longer feasible. For fear of meltdowns (a local problem) and waste (a long-term problem) they put billions of lives at risk in a global and proximate disaster.
I have to admit I minced words, I meant "if we magically had an utopian society tomorrow that would let us agree on a goal and work optimally towards that goal". I didn't want to open the can of worms whether an utopian or "good communist" society is possible, as I think many people here would say it is not - I think some fundamentally "better" society than the current world-wide system is possible and neccessary to have a chanche of dealing satisfyingly with climate change, but I don't know how that would look like of course.
I agree political centralization would be a bad thing. For one, the peripheral will suffer the most from climate change. A society that calls itself utopian in my mind should be decentralized and allow political freedoms.
But anyway, it is just a thought experiment - can any ideal society beat climate change in our lifetimes?
> can any ideal society beat climate change in our lifetimes?
We’re past the point of supply-side solutions. We literally don’t have the materials. That leaves demand reduction. Depending on your definition of “ideal,” the answer could be yes or no.
There's a special breed of alt-right people who are actually well informed on the issue, don't deny climate change but because they are doom&gloom minded libertarians they passionately advocate for de-regulation because "we won't make it, so lets just have a good time when we can". I'm not accusing anyone, it's just that I know such a person with phd in a related field and he is very active online, pushing for alt-right agendas and culture wars in spite of "leftist who cant stop lying". Went offline for weeks when Trump lost and he doesn't like the guy.
I really can't understand this mentality. So what if we probably won't reach the goals? What is the proposed action here? Increase the limits on carbon emissions? Evacuate the places that will go under water?
For some reason, the arguments I see online revolve around the idea of "we can't make it, just don't bother" as if it is a investment opportunity that failed.
I'm anti-everything that pollutes even on a more instinctive level because my nose just can't handle gas odors / car exhaust etc I just hate it.
You will never fix climate change without first fixing wealth inequality.
Ain't no chance in hell John Doe will start biking to his workplace where he'll arrive drenched in sweat while he sees the CEO arriving in a private helicopter.
Another example: Bill Gates being a climate change activist, a noble cause of course but the guy owns the largest fleet of private jets no I do not care he offsets it with credits.
Forget about John Doe, think of Jose Gonzalez in some South American shithole, guy makes less than $50 a week as a taxi driver in his own car, his catalytic converter breaks down and it costs $500 you think he's going to replace it? No way.
I'm inviting everyone in this thread to step into the real world for a moment.
I think 2020 was an unfortunate lesson: the painful crises that we _can't_ control can change consumption / emission more than all the intentional actions and programs by our governments. A giant pandemic, and a shutdown of a lot of normal economic behaviors resulted in a sharp drop in emissions, which was totally reversed in 2021. What if what the world needs now is a hard, damaging recession and perhaps another (or several more) disruptive disease outbreaks? I'm not saying that this would be _good_ exactly, but so far it seems like the only thing that really works.
See that's the problem. Limiting temp change is not a goal distinct from saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars, it's literally about saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars (as well as saving other things more difficult to put price on). And that's the problem with abstractly talking about degrees of warming – we should be directly modelling the human and economic costs of every 0.1° of additional warming. Some economists are doing just that, of course, but then again nobody really knows how reliable any of the models are, so they're easy to ignore.
A "global ice age" was never something that climatologists were seriously worried about, even in the 1970s. It was a media distortion based mainly on research into the possibility of an ice age in the distant future -- like, 10,000 years -- due to normal climate cycles. Even at the time, the much more immediate threat of anthropogenic global warming was recognized.
I followed your link and read the cover story. It's an article about how a middle-east oil embargo which caused Nixon to put a restriction on heating fuels and gasoline. The "Global Ice Age" you quote isn't in the article at all.
I'm sure some of you are reading or have heard of "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" by Peter Zeihan. One of the claims in his book is that the world is rapidly aging and so much so that many countries are now terminal. By "terminal" he means that the populations are past the age where they can have enough children to replace the population. Examples include Germany, China, Japan, Russia.
If you believe in the evidence supporting that claim, then I think we'll be able to hit the IPCC targets simply by waiting for half the world's population to age out over the next 20-30 years. Without a replacement generation in these countries industrial output will collapse along with the energy demand.
We might not need to do anything else, but of course more nuclear would help along with wind and solar if we can sort out grid storage.
Short of a bigger plague than COVID or nuclear war, the static population numbers in developed countries will be dwarfed by population increases in the rest of the world.
This is unlikely because as globalization shuts down, trade in fertilizer will slow and countries will be forced to downshift population growth in order to feed themselves according to what their own lands can produce without imported fertilizer.
So, no, there won’t be large increases in population from the rest of the world.
He also talks about how in a deglobalizing world the one power source most every nation has access to locally is coal. So you could see a reduction in industrial activity and consumption, but still end up with increasing emissions due to nations switching back to coal just to keep the lights on.
Yes, that might happen, or we might find that existing solar, wind, and nuclear infrastructure are sufficient to power the reduced needs of the smaller populations. In developing nations though, I agree that they’ll go to coal.
Still, those nations that lack local coal resources might find it hard to import it due to interference from developed nations trying to curtail warming and from the overall reduction in global trade.
> If you believe in the evidence supporting that claim, then I think we'll be able to hit the IPCC targets simply by waiting for half the world's population to age out over the next 20-30 years.
That might work in theory if 20-30 years weren't at least 10 years too late.
Many countries are expected to see population decline which will have negative economic effects, but the actual change in population isn't that great. For example Russia's population is projected to decline 18% over the next 30 years, and they're one of the worst cases. Overall world population is projected to continue increasing, leveling out around 11 billion in 2100. Many of these people will be born into nations that are in the process of industrializing, or immigrate to the developed world, either way increasing their carbon footprint. The odds are extremely against demographic shifts alone decreasing emissions in this century.
More generally, Zeihan's population projections generally discount immigration. While that might be reasonable for some particularly immigration averse societies like Japan, most developed nations have a positive feedback loop where the more young people they need, the more young people they welcome. Quite a few countries with very low birthrates like Germany are nevertheless expected to still see population growth over the next 30 years driven primarily by immigration.
Between the walk-back of basic human rights in the West through COVID, nuclear superpowers currently appearing to be locked in a state of war and the US on a path of unchecked money printing I'm not sure global warming is in my top 3 civilisational crisises at the moment. Arguably I suppose a monstrous heat wave in India could bump it back up, but really even then we'd be better off facing with cheap energy than walking back from the gains made with fossil fuels over the last 20-30 years.
And the environmental activists are serious contributes to the instability in Europe with their weird insistence that people put ideology before energy security. The Germans screwed up their energy policy because they insisted on policy by ideology and unfounded fear of nuclear.
Even if you're strongly in favor of the more sever restrictions of early 2020 in the US and Europe you have to acknowledge that a lot of normal rights were suspended with the aim of combatting the pandemic. New Zealand even suspended the right of its citizens to return home for a long period of time, which is a pretty harsh violation of rights, and runs contrary to international law. New Zealand's own high court found that to be the case.
New Zealand’s high court found the lottery system used to allocate quarantine spots and the wait time infringed on its citizens’ rights, not forcing a quarantine.
However, Mallon did find that requiring returning New Zealanders to quarantine was not in itself an unjustified infringement.
Clearly my 1 sentence about it is an oversimplification, but that lottery system did in fact prevent New Zealand's own citizens from returning home. THat does probably violate international law.
From the perspective of an American living in NYC: I genuinely didn't notice any of my normal rights being suspended. Sounds annoying for those New Zealanders (?), but already addressed? Personally "walk-back of basic human rights in the West through COVID" isn't something I consider a problem in any way, shape, or form, unless we're talking about things completely unrelated to Covid that happened at the same time.
I also live in NYC, and the total closure of the city is clearly something that infringed on peoples' rights. The inability of people to earn a living was pretty serious. Freedom of assembly is written into the 1st amendment, and the city was literally arresting people for congregating outside in parks. This was especially prevalent in the Bronx in the spring of 2020. Bill de Blasio was literally having police arrest people for being near each other outside and cramming them into over crowded jails in the name of COVID safety, just think about that for a moment.
[EDIT] For anyone who doesn't believe me, see this article from the NYT in 2020[1].
Here's an article from 2020 in the NYT[1] talking about it. The article includes this gem:
>Another dispute between officers and residents of the same predominantly black neighborhood over the guidelines led to a man being knocked unconscious.
The resident in question was sitting on his own stoop.
People don't like being told to cooperate for the greater good. Wish more people knew about the tragedy of the commons, and how the survival of our species depends on selfless cooperation.
The ones [0] I'm principally worried about are Article 13 (freedom of movement within the borders of a state & right to leave from/return to their country), Article 20 (freedom to assemble), Article 23 (right to work) and Article 27 (right to participate in local cultural life). There were some pretty profound attacks on those.
Arguably also Article 9 (arbitrary detention) and Article 26 (right to an education). Although I don't think those are as convincing but the direction we moved in on these wasn't good.
All which were never "cancelled", school went on and freedom to assembly always imvolved goverment approval. That being said, some of the most massive demonstrations I can remember tool place during Covid in Germany.
It didn't help that German politicians intentionally tied themselves to Russian gas in a foolish bid to try and pull Russia westward and to avoid having to rely further on the US for energy. It's also worth noting that a number of German politicians either went to work for Gazprom or were in the case of many Greens funded by Russia. Germany really fucked up.
> didn't help that German politicians intentionally tied themselves to Russian gas in a foolish bid to try and pull Russia westward and to avoid having to rely further on the US for energy
Would note that America made the same mistake with China and the WTO in the 1990s.
I mostly agree, but China already had received MFN status on a provisional basis in 1980 and was until ~1994 a net importer of American goods. The move towards adding the to the WTO was at the time considered the least bad option for how to proceed. No one anticipated Xi in 1990, but everyone knew and understood Putin by the time Nord Stream I was completed.
This myth rwally dies hard, doesn't it? The USSR supplied gas to Germany and Europe reliably since the 60s and all the way through the end of the cold war. Back then the Green party didn't even exist.
The goal of buying gas from Russia was, besides Russia being a very reliable supplier (until recently), to get cheap gas and have a channel of communication and common interests with the "enemy" open. It worked until Ukraine and Putin's one way trip into crazy land.
Schröder got a ton of flak for his proximity to Putin and his positions at Gazprom. Also, he wasn't chancellor for almost 20 years anymore when the war in Ukraine started. And back then having close ties to Russia was good idea actually.
Also as a European, less reliance on the US is a good thing. As would be less reliance on Saudi Arabia, replacing one human rights ignoring autocrat waging offebsive wars abroad with another doesn't sound right (both of them share the same opinion about journalists as well it seems).
Gazprom directly funded the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation[1], for example. Here's an example from 2014 of Russia funding greens in the EU to undermine shale oil to maintain dependence on Russian gas[2]. It's also generally accepted that Russian interests funded the US green presidential candidate Jill Stein (though it's a little murky).
> to get cheap gas and have a channel of communication and common interests with the "enemy" open.
Yeas, I'm familiar with the legacy of Ostpolitik after the fall of the USSR and reunification.
> And back then having close ties to Russia was good idea actually
I'm specifically claiming that it probably was not a good idea in retrospect, and concerning what was known then about Putin.
> Also as a European, less reliance on the US is a good thing.
I can understand why you would feel that way and I have no love for KSA, but clearly reliance on Russia has been a mistake.
I don't remember any attempt to pull Russia westwards. Did Russia had visa waiver with the EU? What kind of real integration was there?
Instead there was a 20 year long streak of trying to pull Russia's neighbours westwards and away from Russia, at the same time Russia being told that it needs not apply.
Basic human rights were never cut back, they were just balanced differently between freedom to assemble and freedom of harm. The US just increased interest rates, as did the EU, so no more money printing.
Considering that the Greens are the most stabilizing force in the German government right now, I doubt that all the current mess is caused by "environmentalists". It was rather unchecked capitalism that got us here.
And nuclear energy has nothing to do woth a gas shortage, Germany is heating by gas not electricity.
Sure. But it's not extinction. One of the contributors to the current crisis was decades of environmental messaging predicting imminent and epic disaster. When that didn't come voters tuned out.
>Maybe it won't wipe out everyone - but like 90% of the population. That's still an absolute nightmare.
source? the IPCC is estimating GDP reduction of a few percentage points by 2100[1]. That's not really consistent with "like 90% of the population" being "wipe out".
Those forecasts are about CO2 stabilisation - so when we've actually taken action to get to net zero. The aim was to show that we could get to net zero without tanking the economy.
Those aren't the effects of climate change on GDP - which is predicted to be -63.9% by 2100 [1]
I think you’d be hard pressed to find a credible source that predicts that level of catastrophe. I like to read Climate Feedback[0], a website where scientists review media claims on climate. 95% are fact checking denialists, but some are the opposite, fact checking claims that severely overstate the danger.
The problem is that overstated danger muddles the message and gives further ammunition to deniers to dunk of the whole movement for green energy.
Here's where we are headed at present I think, just a question of how fast:
> "Carbon dioxide concentration during the mid-Pliocene has been estimated at around 400 ppmv... However, the global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene (3.3 Ma–3 Ma) was 2–3°C higher than today, global sea level 25 meters higher, and the northern hemisphere ice sheet was ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurred in the late Pliocene around 3 Ma." (pliocene climate wiki)
This article is paywalled but it essentially looks to be very similar to an open-access paper (2020) by the same research group. The permafrost and soil carbon feedbacks under different scenarios (Fig 3) are worth looking at:
Realistically, the only things that would noticeably slow the current climate trajectory over the next 100 years are major supervolcanoes or asteroid impacts. Hence, adaptation to new regional climate norms is going to be necessary. However, continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates for the next 100 years would accelerate that trajectory somewhat and have major consequences for the 2100-2200+ timeline.
Net zero worldwide will never be achieved with pure emission reduction because neither China nor the industrializing third world will ever accept trading carbon usage for lower (than potential) living standards.
The only way this works is with massive investment in carbon capture. Reducing emissions is nice but alone will never solve the problem.
What confuses me is that everyone is pledging net-zero by some date but emissions keep rising. So somehwere someone is "laundering" emissions. A quick perusal of the offset-credit industry shows that there is massive recycling (reuse) of credits, relabeling of existing sinks as offsets and all the financial engineering and shenanigans that happen when commons are financialized.
This all makes me very skeptical of lean towards the opinion that climate salvation lies in an alternate energy source which makes fossil fuels uneconomic.
>What confuses me is that everyone is pledging net-zero by some date but emissions keep rising. So somehwere someone is "laundering" emissions.
Nah it's way simpler than that. They're just setting targets and not following them.
>Climate Action 100+, a pressure group formed by 700 investment funds, aims to ensure that 166 of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters align with the Paris targets. It said this year that 69% of them were committed to reach net zero by 2050 or sooner. However, only 17% had set medium-term targets or produced quantified decarbonisation strategies. Almost two-thirds of oil and gas companies are still pursuing projects inconsistent with limiting global warming below 2°C, it noted.
Net-zero is a compromise by most countries that by 2050 they will somewhat "compensate" what they will keep emitting. That doesn't mean reducing the excess of GHG from the atmosphere, doesn't deal with positive reinforcement loops like permafrost thawing or running into a blue ocean event, and will keep worsening the environment like ocean acidification, extreme(r) weather event and more unwanted consequences. And, of course, to keep unearthing fossil carbon and adding it to the system, the compensation may not be so long lasting (I don't know, like planting trees that ends being burned up).
It would be like stop accelerating, but to keep going at an already dangerous speed, like falling after reaching terminal velocity. Yes, we might not be accelerating anymore, but we should expect more than just broken bones.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadIf the goal is "stop burning fossil fuels" there is a large precedent of non-fossil power sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectic, nuclear, etc. Real progress is happening on electric cars. One thing that all of these have in common is that they produce a wanted product: they might be expensive or they might be intermittently available but you spend money to get something you want.
"Net-zero" includes the use of systems that capture carbon directly out of the air, either all mechanical or with plants part of the system. These systems basically don't exist. I mean, there are a handful of prototype systems but there is no trend to scaling them up. The most common form of CO2 "disposal" is to inject it into an old oil well to get more oil. A large carbon capture (from the output of a power plant) system in Texas was recently shut down because they shut down the oil field.
All of those systems need somebody to spend money for a product they don't want to meet an externally imposed requirement. It's going to be very hard to put a system in place to move the money around because of the perception (and reality) that anything that concentrates money in one place is going to be a nexus of corruption.
"Plants" are very inefficient at CO2 capture. Most of the CO2 captured in Earth (by anthropogenic action or just by natural causes) is by algae/bacteria action.
> If the goal is "stop burning fossil fuels" there is a large precedent of non-fossil power sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectic, nuclear, etc.
> All of those systems need somebody to spend money for a product they don't want to meet an externally imposed requirement. It's going to be very hard to put a system in place to move the money around because of the perception (and reality) that anything that concentrates money in one place is going to be a nexus of corruption.
If a conflict in Europe happening right now isn't a good enough incentive to make Europe immediately carbon-free, not much really is.
Renewables alone cannot power the grid. You need something dispatchable for that, or the grid will fail the first time there is a night with low wind. All electricity storage in Europe is a rounding error, and will remain one for at least a decade, no matter what is done. The dispatchable power used to back up wind and solar in Europe is traditionally gas, of which much is Russian.
The rapid need to decouple energy needs from Russia is causing European operators to spin coal plants back up, and even build new ones.
However, that period of net-zero should be a waypoint on the path to sequestering historical carbon (the real goal) but the only way to get there is to first decarbonize everything that we can.
In a way, carbon credits/offsets might actually be a deterrent to that future. There is a notion of a “circular carbon economy” where CO2 is made into useful products in addition to sequestering for carbon credits, but you are right that the dominate use case for captured CO2 is enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Put to that end, there are very few practical long term benefits to sequestering carbon.
That said, one benefit of offsets, tax credits, etc. is funding the creation of the carbon dioxide removal technology we will need by 2050 to offset the hard to abate emissions, but that tech is only useful if we first decarbonize as it hard to imagine it can be scaled up to the 40 gigaton level based on the data today.
We are well on track to get there.
I've spent the past few months studying up on the state of the carbon removal world, and I was encouraged by a couple technologies (there is a lot of cool stuff out there, but there are some which seem more practical than others), which are in the "carbon utilization" bucket—appealing because the CO2 is turned into something with value rather than an abstract credit.
1) using captured carbon to create concrete aggregates as well as in the curing of concrete can make for a stronger material, a carbon sink, and doesn't require much change in behavior 2) turning captured CO2 into carbon fiber more cheaply than the current process could have knock on climate benefits if carbon fiber becomes cheap enough that it enjoys widespread use.
I hope the circular carbon economy pans out because it has the power to stimulate minds. Making something of value out of the air is very "sci fi" and doesn't really ask as much from the populous at large in terms of understanding a pretty complex issue like carbon sequestering.
If by muddier you mean accurate then yes.
We also replaced Newtonian physics with the much "muddier" theory of relativity.
> money ... money ... money ... money
Well that might be the problem, money won't do shit when 2B people will flee to the north. "We can't do X because my stack of magic paper with numbers on it will be smaller if we do so"
For the record the "climate change" phrasing is attributed to republican consultant Frank Luntz and pushed by the Bush administration allegedly as a way to make it sound less frightening. [0]
Some climate organizations are correctly using the expression "climate emergency" which is more apt given the current circunstances.
As a sidenote "Carbon footprint" was also a concept fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers. [1]
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frank-luntz-the-man-who-c...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
Now we are seeing big "net-zero" promises 30 or 40 years down the road, what's mostly likely is that in 15 years there is another big fad for taking action in 50 or 60 years.
>Some climate organizations are correctly using the expression "climate emergency" which is more apt given the current circunstances.
Isn't this the same thing as "climate change", but in the opposite direction?
CO2 emissions are still rising. We are currently cheering and celebrating reductions... in acceleration.
Feedback loops like methane emissions due to permafrost melting are still gonna hit us even if we all went into caveman lifestyles right now. That means that we go into a positive feedback loop where temperature keeps raising irrespective of our actions.
There are already densely populated regions getting close to 'wet bulb temperatures' which means they won't be able to sustain life much longer.
There are regions that have no readiness for floods or draughts or cyclones who will now face them.
Emergency sounds about right to me.
The problem is that "emergency" is fundamentally a loaded phrase, and once you establish a precedent of using loaded phrases when it's "justified", everyone (including your opponents) will start using it. After all, everything is "justified" to the activists petitioning for it. The end result is that every issue gets "emergency" slapped to the end of it, and the phrase becomes meaningless.
I have seen no credible plan for how we would actually do this. Especially given we haven't even managed to stop (or greatly slow) the growth of global emissions much less reduce them to zero.
We definitely have managed to greatly slow emissions growth, and it seems pretty likely that humanity's greatest carbon emitting year will happen before 2030. https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1517943601124229120/ph...
This is slower than it should be, but there's very promising progress to build from
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
The Keeling curve shows that not only is atmospheric CO2 increasing, but the rate it is increasing is also increasing. The difference between the Keeling curve and all other measures of industrial pollution is that the CO2 in the atmosphere can be directly measured, everything else has to be estimated based on reported figures.
It doesn't matter how clever you are in accounting, the atmosphere doesn't care if your reported emissions show progress towards climate goals.
The methane situation is even worse[0].
0. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77921-2
The highest year-over-year increase in CO2 concentration was 2016-2017, and it's been on a downward trend since. The 2020-2021 increase was 30% smaller than the peak. That's still a lot, about 3X 1970 levels, but if the trend continues at the current rate we should return to 1970 levels in 15 years, and that will be with more than double the world population and 30 times the world GDP.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html
Given the distribution of responsibilities, and the societal emphasis on specialisation, I think it’s completely unreasonable to expect the people who study the climate phenomena to also define a plan with such radical cultural change implications.
On the one hand, it’s gonna take everyone to make some adjustments. On the other hand “day to day” folk have been making these adjustments for 40years and it’s clear that we need to make bigger ones, faster. The majority of the current suggestions seem to require changes in capital expectation, and extensive supply-chain alterations of the kind where whole sectors of work will need to change. No-one wants to do either because we live in a culture that doesn’t support these kinds of changes.
It seems there is no non-radical future - either we face catastrophic climate change or unimaginable changes to our way of life.
The only way forward now is radical.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/un-ipcc-...
https://www.iea.org/news/global-co2-emissions-rebounded-to-t...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-022-00285-w
Catching up to meet some goal no one understands isn't possible. The world will get warmer and warmer until some market/military/survival barrier is reached.
"We need to pass this law so that in 1000 years sea levels will be X" is complete farce.
I'm not saying the science is wrong. I've read the ipcc reports and im convinced of human caused warming. I'm saying being right about the science says almost nothing about what changes need to be made in the world.
Humans dont care about altering the environment to meet our needs. The Holocene Extinction carries on.
What? Maybe reducing CO2 emissions?
Maybe you meant that being right about the science says almost nothing about what human beings are willing to do to solve it.
And I guess “science” does not have an opinion about the system we live in, arguably.
No, I didn't mean to say what you said. I meant to say what I said.
And apologies for my wording.
Global warming is the (as usual incredibly well-chosen) name for the rate of increase in temperature going up way too fast. The purpose is to stretch the next 100 years of warming at the current rates to call it 2000 years of warming. To make it take longer. Not to stop it, and not to reverse it. The ideal global warming changes will keep warming the planet, just much slower than is currently happening.
The problem is I'm going to get downvoted for this, as there is an anti-global-warming "theory" that says we're at the start of the next ice age. And like all good lies, it's essentially true. In the next few thousand years an ice age should start. The name global warming, however, means that if possible it'd be nice if all the remaining progress to the next ice age didn't happen in ~200 years.
I know the reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe is uncomfortable to talk about, but aggressive denial is really a problem in the HN community.
I can completely understand people who haven't studied this topic in depth not being aware of how dire the situation is, so asking questions or debating is healthy and expected. Downvoting a comment consisting of a statement of fact combined with a logical hypothesis derived from that fact, backed up by 3 well known citations is not a healthy direction for this community to develop in.
Denial is a part of dealing with this reality, but as a community we should work a bit harder to move towards better acceptance and understanding.
Very often I disagree with some comment and nevertheless upvote, because that comment is really thoughtful and is an important contribution to the discussion with important subjects or perspectives that need to be considered.
Yes, I totally agree. Often I upvote a comment I disagree with since it nevertheless is a thoughtful and important contribution to the discussion. I feel I learn most from people I disagree with.
OP did not write that at all! He only wrote a single sentence, why did you create new text to criticize and attribute it to OP?
I myself keep pointing to the NOAAA page for the CO2 growth rate (https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html) - which is positive and increasing. OP is correct and the parent is too. Even the growth rate still increases, it still keeps getting worse faster! It's unpopular on reddit's /r/de too to say that, with similar justification. As if lying and keeping truth away won't hurt much more because no, people are stupid but not completely.
In addition here in Germany I got so watch from a front seat how the people in the country react when even just a single fossil fuel is cut - and only partially (even for Germany Russia only supplies a part of the gas, even if it's a substantial one). We actually needed to stop regardless of the Russian situation, for climate change alone. Which nobody ever even dares to mention, the public discussion and what politicians have to say is all about "crisis mode". I have not seen a single politician try to reframe it as "we need to do this anyway", it's either about supporting people financially to be able to afford more expensive gas, about who needs to save, or how and where to get other gas faster than 2024 (deal with Katar for LNG).
The head of the state of Saxony warned of "deindustrialization". But we need to cut fossil fuel anyway! Worldwide!
The current crisis should be a chance, but it is only seen, and only framed, as "crisis", to be remedied to get back to full gas storage and fully flowing supplies.
The situation IS this dire! Try significantly reducing usage of fossil fuels in any country. You get riots.
You can plant as many trees and ban plastic straws all you like, the only thing that would make a dent is a significant reduction in removing any more fossil fuels of any kind from below ground to feed it into the above ground carbon cycle. And it is truth that it looks really really bad. That would just limit the growth rate, it still would do nothing towards actually lowering atmospheric CO2.
From the comment I replied to:
>reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe
>how dire the situation is
I read this as "doomed". And if we are already doomed and nothing can be done about it, shouldn't we eat as much meat and take as many flights as we want? This is how a lot of people think when they read stuff like this, and honestly, they have a point. Either it's unavoidable and dire OR we can do something about it (by limiting emissions). So why ask people to make sacrifices and then also tell them we are doomed anyway?
As a suggestion of “fixable” they literally said it was unavoidable.
Someone that forgot about an upcoming test is doomed.
> There's no chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees anymore. It's just not a realistic goal.
They said nothing about 2° being the tipping point between hope and hopelessness. Only that we're more screwed than some people still hope we are.
Honestly I'm not sure if coal is worse than shipping gas from the gulf (which produces lots of CO2 from the compressing and shipping)
I hold "contrary" opinions on the climate debate, but I don't take these kinds of articles the way that you noted at all. I see it simply as an opportunity to change tactics.
Warming is unavoidable so major expenditure on whatever adaptations are possible is just as necessary as getting off fossil fuels, and ignoring that reality will set many areas up for long-term disasters in the near future.
Another uncomfortable reality is that politicians in all fossil-fuel producing nations may give lip service to climate concerns, but in reality none of them are going to try to shut down the most profitable economic activity in their countries. That's what the record shows in the USA as well.
- A thoughtful, non-flippant response and sometimes included citations
- In disagreement with the article/other comments
- Downvoted almost instantly
I personally enjoy reading many of this community's comments, thoughts, and ideas, especially when someone has taken the time to write out a thoughtful response, and even if I may not agree with the conclusion. I really hope others do, as well.
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/305/graphic-when-...
In fact if you look at the source for that graph [1] you'll see it's a paper from 2009 and they used old 2007 IPCC data for their models.
The IPCC has not taken feedbacks into account until their sixth report of which the synthesis hasn't been published yet [2].
In 2009 feedbacks were still not well understood. In fact Natalia Shakhova didn't publish her seminal paper on methane in the Arctic until 2010. Here's an interview with her in 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx1Jxk6kjbQ
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0812721106
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
Curious to hear your take on that.
Maybe I'm missing something but here's my pedestrian view on it.
The thing that bugs me the most is the article almost completely ignores the role of feedbacks. This has been the classic IPCC position (which AFAIK they've rectified for their sixth assessment).
The article only mentions this right at the end:
"If, however, zero emissions were to occur later in the century, there is the potential to lock in more carbon-cycle feedback processes – such as melting permafrost – than under current global temperature levels."
Quite a strange comment considering the permafrost has been melting for decades. See the Natalia Shakhova video I shared on my earlier comment. A quick google search will tell you more about the methane feedback.
And there are other feedbacks already triggered like the Arctic ice melting. Arctic ice deflects sunlight and has been decreasing yearly since we started measuring it in the 70s IIRC. See the latest data from the PIOMAS project:
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger...
The article also makes some bizarre claims such as "If emissions are cut to zero, on the other hand, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would quickly fall, before eventually stabilising at a lower level.". But according to NASA, CO2 remains in the atmosphere between 300 and 1000 years.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...
Then "as the oceans slowly warmed up to reach the same temperature as the atmosphere". The oceans absorb more heat than the atmosphere which is the released over the following decades in a phenomenon sometimes called climate lag.
http://climatecat.eu/ufaqs/5-why-does-co2-lag-temperature/
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/03...
This doesnt sound that impossible? It's already happenening.
> The use of coal for electricity generation in 2021 was intensified by record high natural gas prices
High natural gas prices sound like a good thing for renewables?
Not if it's a short term dip you can only practically fill with coal
Last I heard, we could still physically achive 1.5 degrees, but we would have to switch completely to command economy immediately and take a big reduction in economic activity (a couple times larger than during the peak of COVID). Which I believe is still better than the alternative.
Which is the main flaw that the current economic model has regarding climate change, paying people to do the thing we don't want them to do.
> Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion or 6.8 percent of GDP in 2020 and are expected to increase to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025 as the share of ...
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
It would be with nuclear. But the nutters won round 1, which makes 2º virtually assured.
> we would have to switch completely to command economy
Command economies centralize political power. Broadly speaking, modern elites are insulated from everything but total societal collapse, which any country able to re-organise into a command economy is unlikely to face. One would expect a centralized political structure to give fewer shits about the environment, not more.
Unbuilt plants don't emit carbon. But without nuclear power there was no realistic path to curtailing emissions. Populations won't peacefully accept a reduction in their quality of life. Cutting use is and always was a pipe dream.
When we needed to pivot, in the 80s and 90s, solar and batteries were not yet competitive. They now are. But that's thanks to fundamental breakthroughs in basic research. At this point, ramping up supply chains and industry will take too long for them to forestall 2º. (As was predictable ex ante.) Nuclear + gas would have gotten us to below 2º while easing the transition to wind + solar. Apart from nuclear for baseload at scale, we have coal. It's no shock that everyone who busted their nukes is now burning coal (or importing coal-shaken electrons).
So no, I don't think we can pin blame on the anti-nuke greens. They didn't cause the problem. But they blocked nukes (and in America, gas pipelines) that presented the most realistic path to a future now no longer feasible. For fear of meltdowns (a local problem) and waste (a long-term problem) they put billions of lives at risk in a global and proximate disaster.
I agree political centralization would be a bad thing. For one, the peripheral will suffer the most from climate change. A society that calls itself utopian in my mind should be decentralized and allow political freedoms.
But anyway, it is just a thought experiment - can any ideal society beat climate change in our lifetimes?
We’re past the point of supply-side solutions. We literally don’t have the materials. That leaves demand reduction. Depending on your definition of “ideal,” the answer could be yes or no.
I really can't understand this mentality. So what if we probably won't reach the goals? What is the proposed action here? Increase the limits on carbon emissions? Evacuate the places that will go under water?
For some reason, the arguments I see online revolve around the idea of "we can't make it, just don't bother" as if it is a investment opportunity that failed.
I think similar to your friend.
I'm anti-everything that pollutes even on a more instinctive level because my nose just can't handle gas odors / car exhaust etc I just hate it.
You will never fix climate change without first fixing wealth inequality.
Ain't no chance in hell John Doe will start biking to his workplace where he'll arrive drenched in sweat while he sees the CEO arriving in a private helicopter.
Another example: Bill Gates being a climate change activist, a noble cause of course but the guy owns the largest fleet of private jets no I do not care he offsets it with credits.
Forget about John Doe, think of Jose Gonzalez in some South American shithole, guy makes less than $50 a week as a taxi driver in his own car, his catalytic converter breaks down and it costs $500 you think he's going to replace it? No way.
I'm inviting everyone in this thread to step into the real world for a moment.
Buying carbon offsets is the same as beating your wife every week and then donating money to a battered women's shelter to atone for your sins.
* the cheapest way to generate new energy is still renewables
* the biggest bang for buck change governments could make would be to stop subsidizing fossil fuels
* phasing out the fossil fuels would also increase our global health
So, even in this pessimistic scenario, we should still be phasing out coal as quickly as possible, it's a no-regret strategy.
Did we keep the temp change below 2C? No we just saved millions of lives, Trillions of dollars.
vs
Did we keep the temp change below 2C? Yes, and we saved millions of lives, Trillions of dollars on top of that.
See e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26220900 for a more detailed explanation of where this myth came from.
If you believe in the evidence supporting that claim, then I think we'll be able to hit the IPCC targets simply by waiting for half the world's population to age out over the next 20-30 years. Without a replacement generation in these countries industrial output will collapse along with the energy demand.
We might not need to do anything else, but of course more nuclear would help along with wind and solar if we can sort out grid storage.
So, no, there won’t be large increases in population from the rest of the world.
That's just for the 2c part of the story. Because what you describe will be hell on earth for the transition generation(s) in every other aspects
Still, it’s unavoidable, so we’d better come to grips with what is happening.
Still, those nations that lack local coal resources might find it hard to import it due to interference from developed nations trying to curtail warming and from the overall reduction in global trade.
That might work in theory if 20-30 years weren't at least 10 years too late.
More generally, Zeihan's population projections generally discount immigration. While that might be reasonable for some particularly immigration averse societies like Japan, most developed nations have a positive feedback loop where the more young people they need, the more young people they welcome. Quite a few countries with very low birthrates like Germany are nevertheless expected to still see population growth over the next 30 years driven primarily by immigration.
And the environmental activists are serious contributes to the instability in Europe with their weird insistence that people put ideology before energy security. The Germans screwed up their energy policy because they insisted on policy by ideology and unfounded fear of nuclear.
However, Mallon did find that requiring returning New Zealanders to quarantine was not in itself an unjustified infringement.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/new-zealand-high-...
[EDIT] For anyone who doesn't believe me, see this article from the NYT in 2020[1].
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20220731150232/https://www.nytim...
>Another dispute between officers and residents of the same predominantly black neighborhood over the guidelines led to a man being knocked unconscious.
The resident in question was sitting on his own stoop.
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20220731150232/https://www.nytim...
Arguably also Article 9 (arbitrary detention) and Article 26 (right to an education). Although I don't think those are as convincing but the direction we moved in on these wasn't good.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Would note that America made the same mistake with China and the WTO in the 1990s.
The goal of buying gas from Russia was, besides Russia being a very reliable supplier (until recently), to get cheap gas and have a channel of communication and common interests with the "enemy" open. It worked until Ukraine and Putin's one way trip into crazy land.
Schröder got a ton of flak for his proximity to Putin and his positions at Gazprom. Also, he wasn't chancellor for almost 20 years anymore when the war in Ukraine started. And back then having close ties to Russia was good idea actually.
Also as a European, less reliance on the US is a good thing. As would be less reliance on Saudi Arabia, replacing one human rights ignoring autocrat waging offebsive wars abroad with another doesn't sound right (both of them share the same opinion about journalists as well it seems).
> to get cheap gas and have a channel of communication and common interests with the "enemy" open.
Yeas, I'm familiar with the legacy of Ostpolitik after the fall of the USSR and reunification.
> And back then having close ties to Russia was good idea actually
I'm specifically claiming that it probably was not a good idea in retrospect, and concerning what was known then about Putin.
> Also as a European, less reliance on the US is a good thing.
I can understand why you would feel that way and I have no love for KSA, but clearly reliance on Russia has been a mistake.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-s...
Maybe, but now we rely on Russia even more than we rely on the US. That's certainly not a good outcome.
Instead there was a 20 year long streak of trying to pull Russia's neighbours westwards and away from Russia, at the same time Russia being told that it needs not apply.
Considering that the Greens are the most stabilizing force in the German government right now, I doubt that all the current mess is caused by "environmentalists". It was rather unchecked capitalism that got us here.
And nuclear energy has nothing to do woth a gas shortage, Germany is heating by gas not electricity.
But unchecked climate change is an extinction-level threat.
For some reason the media often focuses on sea level rise, but I think the heatwaves and droughts will be the real threat.
No, it isn't. It's an existential threat to most democracies and much of the population. But we aren't going extinct.
Maybe it won't wipe out everyone - but like 90% of the population. That's still an absolute nightmare.
It's just a threat on an entirely different scale to everything else we are facing.
Sure. But it's not extinction. One of the contributors to the current crisis was decades of environmental messaging predicting imminent and epic disaster. When that didn't come voters tuned out.
source? the IPCC is estimating GDP reduction of a few percentage points by 2100[1]. That's not really consistent with "like 90% of the population" being "wipe out".
[1] https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=34...
Those aren't the effects of climate change on GDP - which is predicted to be -63.9% by 2100 [1]
[1] https://reliefweb.int/report/world/lost-damaged-study-econom...
The problem is that overstated danger muddles the message and gives further ammunition to deniers to dunk of the whole movement for green energy.
[0] https://climatefeedback.org/
> "Carbon dioxide concentration during the mid-Pliocene has been estimated at around 400 ppmv... However, the global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene (3.3 Ma–3 Ma) was 2–3°C higher than today, global sea level 25 meters higher, and the northern hemisphere ice sheet was ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurred in the late Pliocene around 3 Ma." (pliocene climate wiki)
This article is paywalled but it essentially looks to be very similar to an open-access paper (2020) by the same research group. The permafrost and soil carbon feedbacks under different scenarios (Fig 3) are worth looking at:
https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/13/3571/2020/
Realistically, the only things that would noticeably slow the current climate trajectory over the next 100 years are major supervolcanoes or asteroid impacts. Hence, adaptation to new regional climate norms is going to be necessary. However, continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates for the next 100 years would accelerate that trajectory somewhat and have major consequences for the 2100-2200+ timeline.
The only way this works is with massive investment in carbon capture. Reducing emissions is nice but alone will never solve the problem.
This all makes me very skeptical of lean towards the opinion that climate salvation lies in an alternate energy source which makes fossil fuels uneconomic.
Nah it's way simpler than that. They're just setting targets and not following them.
>Climate Action 100+, a pressure group formed by 700 investment funds, aims to ensure that 166 of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters align with the Paris targets. It said this year that 69% of them were committed to reach net zero by 2050 or sooner. However, only 17% had set medium-term targets or produced quantified decarbonisation strategies. Almost two-thirds of oil and gas companies are still pursuing projects inconsistent with limiting global warming below 2°C, it noted.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2022/07/21/internal...
It would be like stop accelerating, but to keep going at an already dangerous speed, like falling after reaching terminal velocity. Yes, we might not be accelerating anymore, but we should expect more than just broken bones.