Earth’s CO2 levels hit record high, despite coronavirus-related emissions drop | Hacker News Reader

Earth’s CO2 levels hit record high, despite coronavirus-related emissions drop

washingtonpost.com

27 pointsjustin6610 comments

The impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns is the strongest argument that personal lifestyle changes will not be enough to end anthropogenic climate change. We need massive investment in carbon capture, nuclear power, and grid-level storage as well as a carbon fee and dividend scheme to offset the impact on the poor.

Why? People are still eating meat, they are still heating/cooling their poorly insulated houses, they are still buying consumer goods on Amazon, they are still driving huge cars to the supermarket.

The only real difference is the air conditioning is in the home office rather than the real office.

We haven't changed our lifestyles that much.

During April daily CO2 emissions dropped 17% compared to 2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x. Even if that were doubled that's a far ways away from net zero and now a few weeks later people are already back to old habits. Long term voluntary austerity won't work, we need carrots and sticks.

Everything both your comments have mentioned are a drop in the water to simply having one less child.

But that's a taboo topic that no one ever wants to talk about.

All the lifestyle and electricity generation changes in the world won't make any difference if populations keep growing as expected.

Proof about "one less child": http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full....

However, the OP is still right: even this is not enough to stop the global warming. We have to remove CO2 from the air.

Have been long saying that geoengineering is inevitable. Most of the world and especially the part that is emitting the most doesn't have the political will to change the status quo and anyone who tries will probably get booted from office anyway.

As an Australian who has personally seen the havoc caused by canetoads, I'm really hoping we put some thought into it before doing something drastic

>they are still heating/cooling their poorly insulated houses

You're telling me! I live in an apartment where my bedroom is on the west side of the building, and during the summer I can feel the midday/evening heat coming through the wall. It doesnt help that the building was built in the 80's at the lastest so insulation isn't as good as it is today.

> they are still heating/cooling their poorly insulated houses, they are still buying consumer goods on Amazon, they are still driving huge cars to the supermarket

Just because we can't do everything at once doesn't mean we should do nothing instead.

We need iron fertilization to strip CO2 from the atmosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

And Stratospheric aerosol injection to prevent runaway warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

I'm worried that we will just become too dumb to do this due to dysgenics and the impact of CO2 on mental performance:

https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2016/07/indoor-co2-du...

This is as expected. CO2 concentration is seassonal and since last peak we added some more. Corona is merely slowing it down. More interresting is the year over year comparison.

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