I think of this when people say we can't afford to mitigate climate change.
A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Also China is the workbench of the world, other nations just shift their GHG load there, first and foremost the US.
Although at that scale, you wonder if you could get down to $10/ton... in which case you'd have removed all of the carbon emissions from 2001 until now.
Human adversity pushes buttons in our brain stem that natural processes or random threats do not.
It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place.
That's the problem.
We don't have it.
Energy, resources or time.
You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.
Lots of fossil fuel aligned people have pivoted from "everything is fine" to "there's nothing we can do now", and echoing the latter might be factually correct, but in the context it smacks of disingenuity.
There's a better term for this rather than "escape velocity", because a similar problem exists for interstellar travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
But I don't necessarily believe in it. The point here is that, IMHO, for every, motto-like, populist data-less claim why we should fight pollution, one can easily come up with equivalently populist data less claim why we should not bother with clime change. In isolation from supporting data these two claims are equally unsubstantiated. If there is some concrete data to share please do so, otherwise it's an echo chamber where people would just upvote what they agree with and downvote what they disagree, without any concern for the actual facts brought out in the claim, it's not a argument taking place in the comments it just people preferences showing up in their votings.
What I heard from the news is that they claim the temperature will raise by 1.5 degree in a near future. Unfortunatly I didn't read the report and don't know what are the proposed policy steps. If you or someone else can summarize (without populism or moto like claims), what's their proposed solutions are and what are the risks, that might be of a big service to the community. Since then we ca exchange data based opinions if the proposed solution seems viable or not and that can move a discussion forward.
Last time, I had a vacation and was able to listen to a in depth discussion of political steps to solve climate change was this https://youtu.be/nNIcHIjFNxs At the time my impression was that it is very hard to make a real progress in this.
DOE: Solar hits 6 cents per kWh in 2017, three years ahead of an ambitious goal, down from 28 cents per kWh in 2011. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030
Solar costs per kWh are unambiguously less than nuclear:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
I love wind and solar. I built a 13 kW array on our property and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year.
However, even if we deploy the most optimal forms of wind and solar energy at a global scale --forms that have yet to be invented-- this will not be enough to stop or reverse atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, even if we do this, it will continue to increase exponentially until such time as the planet --through weather-- sticks its finger on the problem.
This is NOT my conclusion. This came out of a study where Google researchers --who were convinced renewable energy sources was the way to go-- set out to once-and-for-all show the world the path. They were stunned when they discovered just how wrong they were. To their credit, they published the paper and admitted just how wrong they were. This is real science, not hand-wavy stuff. Anyone with the appropriate science background can go through the paper, study the data and reproduce their claims. I certainly did. This paper is what opened my eyes to the nonsense we are being sold. It led to spending over a year trying to understand the reality of the problems we face.
It is well worth reading. Here it is:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
There's a number of other pieces of the puzzle that need urgent action. Cleaning up international shipping is a big one which comes to mind... And reducing driving is another big one.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-cargo-ships-emitting-boatloads...
There's no silver bullet, and we need urgent action on many fronts. But things will be worse if we simply despair and do nothing.
The study including looking at deploying solar and wind world-wide with the most advanced versions of these technologies. They determined that not only would this not stop atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, it would continue to rise exponentially.
Arguing for solar and wind to "save the planet" is the equivalent of being an anti-vaxer and not taking a vaccine in the face of a global pandemic. Even worse than that, it's like believing that drinking bleach will battle the virus. In other words, if you do the math, the real science, it is complete nonsense. The idea simply isn't supported by the scientific realities of the matter.
On the other items.
Yes, container ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps the nastiest stuff you can burn. It's amazing to me that politicians wage battles against straws and NOBODY talks about bunker fuel. It goes to show you that the only things that matter at the political matter are simple messages for simple-minded voters who can keep the politicians floating this nonsense in office through their easy-to-buy votes. Once you detach from ideology the whole thing looks like a big huge stinking mess.
> There's no silver bullet, and we need urgent action on many fronts. But things will be worse if we simply despair and do nothing.
I would put it differently.
First, we need to stop thinking we have the ability to control a planetary-scale problem. We cannot do it. At all. Even if we left the planet --all seven billion of us-- it would take about 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm.
These X prizes are neat and all, but, in this case, they are far more likely to be marketing opportunities for those getting behind them than anything else. If they are even mildly intelligent they likely know the score. Nobody is going to win any of these prizes unless there's marketing value --rather than a scientifically sound actual solution.
Driving our limitation are things like the principle of conservation of energy. Put in relevant terms: We can't fix a mess with less energy than that which went into creating it.
We have people claiming we can reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in just 50 years. That is a thousand times faster than the natural rate of change. I am not sure we have the energy and resources needed to make something like that happen, even if it were possible. The whole thing is almost laughable.
I urge you to get on Amazon and order a CO2 meter. Then go around taking reading. What you will learn will astound you. In a nutshell, we have been living in 600 to 1,000 ppm CO2 environments, likely for centuries. The ~400 ppm number quoted by those pushing a sky is falling narrative are average atmospheric readings at who knows what location and altitude. Measure CO2 in your home, apartment and office. Measure it at your neighbors and friends. You will most-definitely be surprised. And then, the question you should ask is simple: We have been living in high CO2 ppm environments all of our lives...the sky has not fallen and people have not turned into mush. Why are we being misled?
"That realization prompted us to reconsider the economics of energy. What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years."
In other words, it's absolutely an economics question. It's also a policy question: Subsidies and penalties can radically change the economic realities for power plant operators. They're saying it's a very hard road. But notably, their graphs are not delta functions: There's paths between the best case and worst case scenarios, and excellent progress on the renewables front can, indeed, change the direction of the curve. Pulling carbon back to pre-industrial levels absolutely requires active sequestration, though, and there are efforts on that front, though the second law of thermodynamics tells us it's a hard road. But again, some progress is better than none.
Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism, I'm sorry to say. We should absolutely expect fluctuations in co2 measurements based on geography and proximity to large volumes of co2-spewing vehicles. There are standards for the calculation of average co2 ppm, which are helpful for knowing the overall state of things, and trends over time.
They set out to prove that renewables was the way. They discovered they were wrong. That is a paradigm-shattering conclusion. To this day we hear incessant talk about renewables "saving the planet". This is nonsense.
The only problem I have with the paper is that they did not follow this conclusion with a real study of the plausibility of any solution on a human time scale. They say things like having to capture carbon and have better power plants in 40 years. None of it is correlated to actual realizable effects at scale.
> Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism
That isn't MY graphic! That's from the 800,000 ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
It's the first link in the "Graphics" section.
If you are going to all this tin-foil it means negating all science on the subject. This data is incredibly accurate and reliable. One of my first questions when finding this data set was the simplest of inquiries: Can ice core atmospheric data from 800,000 years ago be accurate? Well, it turns out, yes, it is. I found and read papers on the subject. It's fascinating technology actually.
The statement I made was that solar and wind --renewables-- can't help us and are pretty much an empty pursuit as it pertains to "saving the planet". These researchers went into it CONVINCED renewables was the way and conducted this research to, as they said, once and for all show the world. What they discovered is they were as wrong as one could be. Renewables are a waste of time, money and resources. They are good and very much justified for other reasons, just not anything related to climate change or atmospheric CO2 concentration.
As I said, I have a 13 kW solar array, soon to grow to 20 kW. I am under no delusion about what it is for. It serves no purpose whatsoever as it pertains to climate change. This is particularly true if you consider the entire installation, which includes a large ground-mounted structure, concrete footings, etc. I sometimes wonder how much carbon was produced to go from minerals on the ground to a structure on my property with a theoretical 13 kW peak generation capacity. Different subject.
Well, being that the argument is grounded in physics and the math that accompanies the analysis, this is a time-independent truth.
To state the problem more accurately: We cannot do a thing about climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
The numbers being thrown about for some of these would-be solutions are just plain silly. 50 years? For a planetary scale problem? Yeah, sure.
Again, one must understand that it was absolutely possible for us to add massive amounts of CO2 in short order. Removing it isn't quite as simple. We were able to add it because burning tens of billions of barrels of oil every year is easy. Any fool with a match can start a forest fire. It takes millions --billions-- of times more energy to reverse the effect of what started with a simple match.
That's the context. Every purported solution must pass the physics test. None of them do. Small scale, sure. Planetary scale. Not one.
Every time I look at this I am reminded of the joke one of my physics professors used to tell us with sometimes annoying frequency. He would start on a new problem, chuckle, and say: Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. His point was that reality was always far more complex than what we had to do in order to learn and explore principles.
The very first problem is that we know, without a doubt, what the baseline is for affecting a (roughly) 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2: 50,000 years. However, this baseline has a pretty tough requirement: Humanity has to leave the planet or the clock does not start.
If humanity left the planet tomorrow, we know that, on average, it will take about 50K years for that 100 ppm drop. This is roughly what people are saying they can do in just 50 years with various magical solutions. In other words, they are claiming that they can do a THOUSAND times better than the rate of change that would correspond to humanity not existing at all.
How do we know this? We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric data taken from ice core samples. In other words, we can see what the planet was doing when humanity's influence on CO2 and the climate was so insignificant we might as well have been on Mars.
If, for example, someone claims that we can "fight" climate change (I love the hubris) by installing solar panels and wind power generator everywhere, well, they have to show how this is better than humanity leaving the planet. No hand-wavy stuff, real science, math, physics. These ideas do not survive the test of hitting the realities of physics inside an Excel spreadsheet.
You don't have to take my word on it for this particular case:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what was going on. It is real science, reproducible by anyone with the skill set, and nothing even close to hand-wavy bullshit. To paraphrase, the conclusion they reached goes something like this:
"Even if we deployed the most optimal versions of all renewable energy technologies. Meaning, versions of all technologies that have yet to be invented. Not only would this not reverse or stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. CO2 levels would continue to increase exponentially."
These researchers went into this work convinced renewables were the way to do it and they set out to prove it once and for all. I give them huge credit for having the guts to communicate that their bubble was popped by their own research and that, no, this idea is nothing less than utopia.
We don't even have to stop there. The chart in this article, when combined with the other data, absolutely made the issue crystal clear for me:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
Remember what I said about the baseline? 100 ppm in 50,000 years, if humanity left the planet? Anything less than that is pointless as it will be in a range between never affecting CO2 concentration to taking far longer than 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
The chart in this article shows each country's contribution to the CO2 problem.
US 15%
China 28%
India 7%
Russia 5%
Europe about 7%
The rest close to 40%
In other words, if someone were to propose that we install solar panels on every single home in the US. The question they have to answer is:
How is that going to be better than if the US simply evaporated and we stopped contributing 15% to the global problem?
It isn't! Which means it isn't a solution. It is, at best, hubris and, at worst, criminally negligent or irresponsible to propose consuming a nation's treasure on something that is as pointless as can be.
OK, now China and the US are beamed-up by Captain Kirk. Same issue. Now we are down to 57%. Won't fix the problem at all.
If we all left it gets down to 0% and it takes 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
Anything LESS than that scenario will take longer or do nothing at all.
That's where the impossibility of things like "save the planet" or "affect climate change" or "become carbon neutral" come into the proper lens. These are all fantasies. Sorry. Anyone wishing to challenge this has to prove their purported solution can pass the physics test at a planetary scale. Showing that it works when we assume a cow to be a uniform one meter diameter sphere of milk isn't equivalent to planetary scale in the real world.
In the real world we have things like the massive forest fires burning in nearly every continent every year. In California we now have a fire that is likely to contribute more carbon in a few weeks than the entire gasoline-based ground transportation fleet in the US in an entire year. Last I checked it was only 31% contained. There are massive underground coal fires that have been burning for decades, even centuries in some cases. That's reality. Not the utopia we are being sold.
What to do then?
Well, we clean-up our act for other reasons. No, we are not going to "save the planet" at all. We don't have that power. We clean-up our act because it is better than being absolute pigs and causing more damage. We also clean-up our act because this is part of learning to live with what we cannot alter.
I urge anyone who think they know anything about this subject to get on Amazon right now and buy a CO2 meter. I have several. Go around your home, apartment, your friends and neighbors places, the mall, your car, etc. Measure and take notes. What you should discover is that, while atmospheric CO2 concentration is --depending on how and where you measure it-- in the order of 400 ppm, we have been living with much higher levels for a very long time, likely centuries. You will discover levels in the order of 650 ppm in your home and other homes. You will measure somewhere around 1,000 ppm in your car. It will be similar at the office and at the store.
The interesting thing is that the sky hasn't fallen and we have not turned into goo. We can, apparently, live just fine in higher CO2 content. Ideal? Perhaps not. I'd like to see a study that determines if we have an evolutionary adaptation for an optimal CO2 concentration range. I don't know of any, other than fear-mongering stuff that twenty years ago, was claiming we would suffer mass extinction by now.
None of this is to say that climate change isn't real and that we have not contributed to make things worse. It is very real. It has been for billions of years. And, yes, we managed to accelerate the rate of increase by burning the equivalent of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years of trees and bio matter in just a few centuries. That's how we did it. And we can't reverse that, not on a human time scale.
I continue to be baffled by how otherwise intelligent people just take what they are told --about any subject really-- and do not bother to confirm before parroting the stuff far and wide. This is not how we solve problems.
Probably the only way that could potentially fix things is direct temperature manipulation schemes. There's a lot of them that have been proposed.
Worth noting that the major economies in Asia aren't doing much of anything tangible for co2 reduction. The EU has basically the world's smallest petroleum industry so it's no sacrifice for them to push climate change measures. The US will effectively be transferring huge amounts of its economic wealth to other petroleum countries who don't care. Ugly all around.
Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for us to address.
The principle is brutally simple. To state it in relevant terms: It cannot take LESS energy to solve a problem than that which went into creating it.
To further lend context, it is important to understand how the planet dealt with this when humanity was insignificant. We have this data going back 800,000 years. This comes from highly reliable ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
The charts:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
And this is my curve fit to try and measure the rate of change:
https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png
And so, in rough terms, it took about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and about 50,000 years for the same decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Any inquisitive mind would want to know how this happened. How did CO2 concentration increase and decrease? The answers are relatively simple. We were not around (or we were insignificant), so it wasn't humanity, not going back 800,000 years.
The increase, among other things, was caused by massive forest fires rolling through entire continent. Without modern fire fighting technology, these fires burned and rolled through the land constantly. The only thing that would stop them would be running out of fuel or heavy rains.
The decrease was mostly a combination of having burned off enough carbon stores that rains, hurricanes, cyclones --the weather-- over tens of thousands of years, precipitated CO2. Forests grew once more, capturing more carbon...only to burn again at some point and repeat the cycle.
How, then, were we able to influence this in a few centuries?
Again, simple: We burned the equivalent of unimaginably massive forests at a much faster rate than the natural order of things. We did this by burning oil. One gallon of petroleum is said to have required about 100 tons of plants and biomatter. Today we are burning oil at a rate of nearly 100 million barrels per day, or 35 billion barrels per year. One barrel is equivalent to just over 31 gallons. Which means that burning a barrel of oil is like burning 3,100 tons of plants and biomatter. This isn't an exact calculation, of course. It does serve to get a sense of proportion about what we are discussing. The scale is absolutely unimaginable.
And so, while the planet experienced these ~100K year cycles without us around, when we started to use oil we got to the point where we effectively burned the equivalent of entire forests in a single day...every day...every year...for decades, centuries. That's how we were able to change the upward rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Reversing it is a very different story. Making a mess is easy. Any fool can light up 30 gallons of gasoline and make an absolute mess. All it takes is a match. In sharp contrast to that --and going back to the concept of conservation of energy-- you simply cannot reverse the process by expending less energy than what it took to create it in the first place. Except that this energy isn't the energy of the match, but rather the energy stored in the 30 gallons of gasoline that went up in smoke. In reality, once dispersed, the byproducts of this combustion are nearly impossible to contain and revert. It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and resources to reverse the effects of 100 million barrels of oil used per day. And we do that each and every day and have been burning this stuff for centuries at an increasing rate.
This isn't to say we should do nothing at all. What I am saying is that we are having the wrong conversations because we have allowed politicians and various forces to make a cult out of this thing. Very little of what is being put out on this every day is true. We can't reverse this in 50 years. We can't do it in a century. This will take tens of thousands of years. In other words, it is likely outside a human time scale.
What to do then? Well, we need to start having the right conversations. We need to start figuring out how to live with this and survive. We are not going to fix it. We need to adapt to it. That's where our technological focus should be, not in magic pixie dust to "save the planet". If we persist, we will not only lose the opportunity to adapt, we will likely risk killing all life on earth through a hairbrained scheme to save a planetary scale ecosystem that we have the hubris of thinking we can control.
Every time I post about this I get eviscerated with downvotes and sometimes comments. And yet, not one person ever takes the time to read and review the sources I provide, go through some super simple math and come back with something like "Hey, I think you missed this point". I want to be wrong about this. Personal insults and downvotes don't serve any purpose at all other than to reveal the intense indoctrination people have been subjected to. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we made it worse. No, we can't fix it.
Think. Don't be drones.
What is impossible about direct temperature manipulation schemes? I'm referring to proposals like building reflectors to directly lower the earth's temperature. There's nothing in principle preventing this from directly cooling the planet.
Also, what do you know about the physics of CO2 absorption/re-emission? CO2 absorbs what exactly? To start it's the 15 micron band. It is infrared radiation on the longer, weaker side of IR. How much heat does 15 microns contribute to, and what types of molecules [eg ice or water, or only atmosphere?] can actually interact with 15 microns vs. being transparent to it? Since water vapor already absorbs at 15 microns, how does that modulate the effect of CO2? Does CO2 even re-emit 15 microns back to earth, or does it just cause co2 to wiggle a little bit (it definitely causes it to wiggle, but what frequency does it re-emit, if any?) Quantifying heat caused by 15 microns is not something you will find information on, even though the entire carbon based global warming arguments depend entirely on it. But there is another relevant point to be made:
15 micron is in the terahertz spectrum specifically. This spectrum is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to build any sort of transmitter or receiver for, mainly because the air/water vapor simply absorb it in a short distance. To this effect I've heard one college physics professor who publishes his lectures on youtube argue that 15 microns is 99.9% already absorbed in the atmosphere by such effects [1] [eg adding more CO2 will make effectively no difference at all; it's all absorbed already]. We do know the main atmospheric window where energy can reflect back into space does not include the 15 microns band [e.g. CO2's absorption profile doesn't fall in the main atmospheric window]. My question for you is how much time have you spent thinking about absorption/EM spectrum based arguments that get at the actual mechanism of how carbon based global warming is supposed to work? Most people have not. I don't have all the answers, but the physics actually seems to imply it's possible if not likely we could be completely wrong in our assumptions about CO2 and global warming. I would challenge you to come up with a rebuttal to that, in the same way folks have not come up with a rebuttal to the argument you posted. So yes, we're having the wrong conversations.
As an alternate potential explanation consistent with the physics, CFCs do absorb in the atmospheric window, and even though they were banned decades ago it turns out they are on the rise again [2]
I don't think anyone can name even one project of non-trivial scale that successfully controlled a natural environment. I am talking about something of the scale of a small to mid island. Something that might give support for a project hundreds of thousand, millions, tens of millions of times larger.
Wanting to control anything at a planetary scale is pure hubris. C'mon. As I like to say, if we listen to the fools pushing these ideas we are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save it.
And then there are truly perplexing every-day things that provide further proof that controlling anything is hopeless. Our town is going through and repaving a bunch of streets and avenues. There's nothing --absolutely nothing-- wrong with them. I've lived here over 30 year. The streets are damn-near perfect.
Just a block from my house, they tore-up about half a mile out of this avenue and replaced it with a black tar covering. Black as can be. The prior surface was mid gray. I used to take walks down that avenue. Not any more. The heat emanating from the black surface is impossible to describe. Every single street being repaved is getting the black tar treatment. How can we possibly hope to improve anything at a planetary scale when we fuck up neighborhoods just by repaving streets.