As I understand it (and I would like to know if this is wrong). Carbon dioxide emissions take 5-10 years for their heating impact to work through into warming.
So even if we could get to net zero today we'd still be in for 5-10 years of worsening impacts.
And we're not even talking about getting to net zero today. Even in the UK where we've exported and reduced emissions a long way net zero by 2035 is seen as a wildly optimistic scenario.
So it seems to me inevitable that we're going to need to do geoengineering. We mustn't let this delay emission reduction but I think at this point we should get to where we're going asap so we can research it properly.
> So it seems to me inevitable that we're going to need to do geoengineering.
Nobody knows how to do that at scale and for a time frame long enough and safely (although there are experiments all over the place). Stopping fossil fuels, moving to renewable and nuclear, using less energy is the only known and safe way. And for the rest of time, adapt (which, depending on the speed of our efforts, will mean less people in uninhabitable zones and migrations or, if we're too slow: wars).
Safe for who? How are we going to extract the resources required for that clean energy transition without further habitat destruction? Energy is IMO a red herring, yes energy is needed to maintain our current way of life. But what about all the other species we share this world with? Spoiler, the unsustainable part is modernity https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/
"Stopping fossil fuels, moving to renewable and nuclear, using less energy" is great. None of it just doesn't reverse climate change even a little. It just means we have dialed the oven regulator from 3 to 2. The oven will reach maximum temperature anyway, just a little slower.
Geoengineering is not similar thing to the emission reduction initiatives, it is a completely different idea with a completely different result in the end. You can't substitute one for another.
Assuming that's correct about 5-10 years (though honestly I doubt it takes that long). The question is - why do you assume that after 10 years gas suddenly stops heating atmosphere? Gas will stay there for the practical purpose "forever", enough to heat atmosphere for thousands of years.
I don't think you got it right, the rate of warming depends on the concentration (i.e. the total amount) of GHGs in the atmosphere, not the rate at which they're emitted. GHGs basically reflect (actually absorb and re-emit) some of Earth's thermal radiation back to the surface, they act as an "insulator" (a greenhouse) just by being there.
Disclaimer: I am 100% convinced climate change is real and humans have some influence in it.
My question: do we even know what the baselines are?
If we look at the history of the world climate has never been constant. So on one hand I am afraid humans messed up, on the other hand it's very difficult to see if the current climate change is totally caused by humans. Especially now El Niño is causing changes all around the world.
You're asking the wrong question. There is no baseline, no natural temperature. The "baseline" temperature has and will change over millions of years.
The right question is about the rate of change. If the temperature changes slowly, ecosystems adapt and migrate. If it changes quickly, they cannot.
Changing a degree or two over ~10,000 years appears to have happened relatively often. This causes some species loss, but in general the ecosystem thrives.
Changing a few degrees over hundreds of years is a leading theory of the cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the largest extinction event since the oxygenation of the atmosphere.
Changing a few degrees over decades? We're going to find out.
Adding a disclaimer to a denialist "just asking questions" talking point doesn't really convince me of sincerity these days. I suppose it could depend on what you mean by history though. If we look at the history of the world, humans basically haven't existed and I'm thinking probably won't for very long.
On one hand it seems we do so many "green deals" that it's basically impossible to manufacture anything in Europe anymore, and every house has a solar panel (made in China), and there are electric cars roaming the streets
On the other hand it seems it doesn't really help?
It's impossible to say for sure whether and how much the efforts helped, because we don't know the alternative. If we hadn't done those things, maybe the indicators would be 20% worse. Maybe 40%. Maybe 1%. We literally don't know.
I do know that if you are in a car headed for a brick wall at 50 mph, taking your foot off of the gas is a good idea.
The vast majority of cars I see burn fossil fuels and I rarely see a solar panel on a house. Where are you living to have such a radically green experience?
everything else is single digit percentages. Those single digit percentages can still be massive numbers (aka a billion tons of CO2e per year for cement production), but they aren't "worst polluters".
Why are you surprised? The amount of greehouse gasses in the atmosphere is only increases, and nobody is meaningfully removing it. Of course heating will continue, even if emissions will suddenly really go to zero (which they are not).
From previous discussions here on hn and their linked sources, it seemed to me like sulphur only made up for a small amount of the total change, even though it was sometimes touted as an "obvious solution" by the kinds of people who think climate change is no problem, since we can easily geoengineer our way out of it.
I generally approach such claims with scepticism, as i feel like they often start with a conclusion and then work backwards from there, with an unrealistic dose of optimism on the way. That type of discussion tends to delay the discussion of more serious and practical measures.
while one thing doing a big difference is unlikely, i do believe we could geo-engineer our way out of this, especially if we put AI agents at the task - the problem is can we get the right power brokers to stop pushing it off until tomorrow and fix it today?
We could plant billions of trees around utah and colorado and reroute pacific ocean water via pipeline to existing and new man-made lakes in these areas, the sea water evaporating giving rise to more rain and ending some of the draught issues for one...
Another idea is A nation-wide network of pipes where every city is a part of a grid that sends water where it needs to be when it needs to be there... less waist, less struggles for places without needed water.. etc...
A big space shield could do wonders at least for cooling us down some... perhaps it could double as some sort of energy system that beams down energy in the form of a laser or something, I think i read that somewhere..
Lots of different ways to capture co2/methane.. I mean couldn't factories just run exhause pipes into very deep holes in the ground instead of releasing into the air? Or buy filters to put on every smoke stack..
I'm no scientist, but i think there's a million other ideas out there to geoengineer thigns.....we just need to act...and nobody wants to do that... we waste so much human energy on mundane tasks -- like looking for food because we were born poor, that if we just eliminate poverty and put all the would be homeless on the path towards being scientists, we could have an entire new civ in 20 years..maybe without climate change being such a big deal.
We have the ability to do amazing things, we've done them before, we just lack the global unity and will to even try.
For a clarification. as a thought experiment ask the question "Why can volcanoes cause global cooling events." and approach the answer as an engineering challenge.
It is one of those things that is a terrible supervillain type idea. Ill founded and very prone to be hit the worst way by the law of unintended side effects. But it is also fun to think about as a sort of evil what if.
Volcanoes emit a lot... I mean an extreme amount of co2. They are also associated with global cooling events. This does not match general greenhouse carbon theory. So you go digging in to find out why. and the answer is complex but one major reason is that they also emit a lot of sulfur dioxide and sulpher dioxide has a negative greenhouse coefficient. that is, when found in the upper atmosphere it has a net cooling effect.
So you do a little mustache twirl, give an evil cackle, and proclaim "It is a shame we worked so hard to remove sulfur from our fuels." I mean acid rain was not really all that bad, was it? When really in the mood I also like to conclude with "The obvious thing to do is to add additional sulfur into jet fuels"
The final fun thing to do after you have just become an internet expert(that is you read the wikipedia page) on greenhouse theory. Is to inform people that water vapor has 10 times the greenhouse coefficient of co2. I will leave it to the reader to figure out why this both is and is not a problem.
Depends where in Alaska. An awful lot of it is going to turn into sea as the permafrost melts and land subsides. It’s already happening, and is a positive feedback loop.
Even in land there can be problems. If you do not consider a new summer flooding area or you calculated that the frozen terrain was estable to build and now it melts. Underground currents can slowly create problems.
If you measure something that has catastrophic consequences if it gets “too big” and later find out that the measurement understated things then that is disconcerting. The headline seems appropriate.
>Anything will blow off the charts if you have the wrong scale.
>I feel like the responses to my comment do not understand what a scale is or what it means for something to go off it.
Readers understand the comment and understand what a scale is.
HN readers are notoriously critical of comments that don't add substantively to the discussion. Language is often used in ways that extend beyond the direct literal meaning of the words. and maximally pedantic interpretations ceased to be interesting a long time ago for most HN readers.
Also, in practice, chart scales and scale heights are generally an implicit measure of historical data range and variability, so if something blows past the top of the chart, even in a maximally literal interpretation, that is commonly a sign that something significant has happened in the signal being charted.
So even if we could get to net zero today we'd still be in for 5-10 years of worsening impacts.
And we're not even talking about getting to net zero today. Even in the UK where we've exported and reduced emissions a long way net zero by 2035 is seen as a wildly optimistic scenario.
So it seems to me inevitable that we're going to need to do geoengineering. We mustn't let this delay emission reduction but I think at this point we should get to where we're going asap so we can research it properly.